Blast from the Past

A bit over-dramatic title, but I just couldn’t think about anything else.

After nearly a year in JavaScript Wonderland I got pulled down to earth few months back. An opportunity came around for some old fashion JDE contract work. With the JavaScript Wonderland still very much an aspirational universe, I was quite happy to jump on board. Nothing beats regular pay-cheques when you haven’t seen one in awhile.

I soon came across the well worn challenge of digging up test-data for the work I was doing. Finding suitable test data can be quite daunting, particularly if you’re working at a new site. To help with this I decided recently to dust off some tools I wrote for JDE almost 15 years ago.

The basis of CelinOWTools is a COM interface to some of JDE’s API. COM was quite revolutionary at the time, promising application build from language agnostic software component.
In addition to CelinOWTools I also wrote CelinOWXL component to act as an intermediary with MS Excel. The idea was to pull data from JDE with CelinOWTools and write it to Excel with CelinOWXL.

The blast is not that CelinOWTools has survived from version 7.3 and the conglomerate gobblings of JDE by first PeopleSoft and then Oracle; but it actually runs better!
Getting CelinOWXL to work needed a bit of hacking with the price of occasional Excel violation and panic freeze. I never got around to debugging this behaviour – being the only user I just got used to frequent saving. But now after some intense use for a month and bit, it hasn’t even panicked once!

Excel, being the Swiss army knife of software, can also be used to test business functions. First you need lorikeet from the CelinOWTools-box.

Lorikeet generates VBA or .Net class-wrapper for for JDE business functions. A VBA class wrapper can be imported into Excel and tested by scripting a Module.

The moral of the story? Non really – but I find this interesting (and maybe I need to get out more).