Note: This month's tip is an update to a blog post originally made a few years ago, when integrated record locking functionality was first incorporated into the Valence RPG toolkit (in version 3.2.20130912.0).

If there's one common theme among IBM i power users, it's that they all love playing with spreadsheets! Fortunately, Valence makes it easy to cater to this love.

Normally the paths associated with Valence apps are hard-coded to specific values that never change. The users clicks on the app and the Valence Portal directs them to a specific IFS path or web page. But what if you had a special use case where you wanted to alter the IFS path or URL based on who is logged in, or depending on which environment they're using? This can be done using a special exit program technique that will dynamically alter the path of an app upon being launched from the Valence Portal.

REST-based web service, with the other end being the "consumer" of said service. Consider this scenario:  You want to give a VIP customer the ability to have their system automatically contact your system to obtain real-time shipment status updates for specific orders being fulfilled by your company.  And as luck would have it, you've already done the legwork to creat an order inquiry Valence app on your system, complete with an RPG program that provides the necessary data for these shipments in JSON format.

CNX Support. The new features included with Valence 4.2 are summarized in last month's Cat-out-of-the-Bag post, with one significant addition: The mobile version of Nitro iAdmin is now included with the Valence Framework. This handy mobile app makes it possible to perform common IBM i administrative tasks while you're on-the-go with your SmartPhone.

As you create and deploy more Valence apps within your organization, logging in to the Valence Portal becomes more of a daily routine for your IBM i users. In such cases, setting up a global auto-start tab (as done in Portal Admin > Settings > Session Options > Application to autostart) can be a handy way to convey daily news, bulletins and announcements to the office staff. This tip shows how to make that launched tab "stick" so that it's always open. You could also apply this concept to any other apps that are launched in the Valence Portal.

How time flies!  We're well into September now, which means we're just over a month away from the next major release of Valence, version 4.2. While there are a number of goodies being incorporated into this newest release, the biggest items for Valence 4.2 are:

• PHP support
• JSON-based web service functionality
• A new solution for running 5250 programs in the Valence Portal

Here's a quick breakdown of the details behind these features...

With the recent introduction of Polish as our ninth spoken language translation in the Valence Portal, developers now have yet another option for supporting multilingual installations running on IBM i.

GDANSK, POLAND.  CNX announced at the COMMON Europe Congress today the general availability of a Polish language version of the Valence Portal for IBM i.  Released as an update to Valence Framework 4.1, the addition of Polish brings the total number of spoken languages available in the Valence Portal to nine, including English. The other included languages are German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Japanese. 

As you roll out more and more Valence apps to your IBM i users, it's only a matter of time before you receive a call from someone claiming a program didn't respond with the expected data, or took too long to respond. Or perhaps it didn't respond at all!

Ever wished you could save and test your front-end development work locally, on your own PC or laptop, then push it to your IBM i only when it's ready for user testing or production? Turns out this is indeed something you can do! Using this process, the changes you make during development are completely local to your PC, thereby not affecting any deployed Valence app in the interim.

The 2015 SenchaCon conference took place last week in Silicon Valley, with a host of exciting announcements about what's in the pipeline for web and mobile app development.  As assessed by the CNX staff in attendance, here are the top five most interesting tid-bits for the Valence community to come out of the show:

IBMSystems Magazine recently profiled  JFW vineyards, makers of Kendall Jackson wines. JFW vineyards cover 15,500 acres in 6 California counties. JFW migrated from the Microsoft* Visual Basic platform to the open CNX Valence interface tool.

Old UI habits die hard!  You may have developed some of the most beautifully functional and user-friendly Valence apps for your company, but the green screen legacy can still be hard to overcome. So long as your company's operations require at least some 5250 programs to be used -- as is typical for IBM i sites that have been around for a while -- then persuading users to flip from Client Access over to their web browser to do, say, a quick inventory or order look-up in Valence may pose a challenge.

Protecting your company’s data from hackers is not something to be taken lightly. The costs related to recent high-profile data breaches at Sony and Target alone run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

As your repository of Valence apps grows, you may soon find occasion where you'd like to “spawn” one app from another in the Valence Portal. For example, you may have a simple inventory lookup app that you could launch whenever someone clicks on a line on a customer order, passing in the corresponding product number so the user doesn’t have to re-enter it manually. That same inventory lookup app could also be launched when clicking on an item in, say, a purchase order app. And so on. This kind of functionality inter-app functionality can serve as a great convenience your users.

Features native portal app for iOS devices and updated user interface components CHICAGO, IL. CNX announced today the general availability of version 4.1 of the Valence Framework for IBM i. Valence 4.1 introduces new options for developing and running IBM i applications on iOS devices (iPad/iPhone), as well as support for a new set of front-end components for regular desktop apps. Back-end support for IBM i OS 7.2 is also included with this release.

Imagine this scenario:  You've developed and deployed a beautiful Valence-based customer order entry app to replace your company's former green screen program.  Your customer service users can now easily launch the app to initiate new orders, quickly fill out the mandatory header fields and enter item details for the order.  All is well! But then one day, while in the middle of entering an exceptionally large order, one of your users gets distracted and inadvertently closes the order entry app before hitting Save.  Poof!  All their data entry work is gone and they have to start over.  

Just about every employee has access to a smartphone or wifi-enabled tablet with a built-in camera these days.  The ubiquity of these image-taking devices -- coupled with HTML5 methods that allow access to the photos -- presents a unique opportunity for IBM i developers to create apps that can pull in images and store them on the IFS.  So whether you're looking to incorporate a photo of a shipment to show proof of packing, store a picture of a damaged item for an insurance claim/RMA, or simply add an employee image to your personnel master, Valence Framework makes it possible.

As you develop and deploy new web or mobile apps for your Valence users on IBM i, inevitably you will run into situations where you're tempted to hard-code global values into your program to control the behavior of your app.  For instance, perhaps you have a situation where you want to default a date field value out by 10 days, so you place code in your program to take the current date and add 10, knowing that someday some user will inevitably be asking you to change the default to 14 or 7...