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Roundtable for Windows - Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ


Roundtable for Windows Frequently Asked Questions
April 1996 by StarBase Corporation

Question 1: Can I manage files other than PROGRESS
program files with Roundtable? (ie. 'C' code, bitmaps,
Word documents,etc.) How do I do it?

Answer 1: Yes. You can manage any kind of file with
Roundtable, including binary files up to 1 Meg in size.
You can use PCODE type objects or DOC type objects to
manage these.

PCODE objects: PCODE objects are the most flexible
way to manage non-PROGRESS files. If you do not want
to use the PROGRESS ADE tools (UIB, Procedure Editor)
to edit your files, then you can create a special
Code Subtype and specify your own edit program for it.
See section B.3 in the manual, which describes an example
of an Edit Program called rtb/p/rtb_open.p.
It causes your file to be opened based on its file name,
extension and your MS-Windows File Types. You will also
want to turn off the "Program?" flag for these special
code subtypes - which tells Roundtable that these are not
compilable PROGRESS programs.

DOC type objects: The simplest and quickest way to create
a new non-PROGRESS document within Roundtable is to create
it as a DOC type object. DOC type objects always reside
in a DOC subdirectory. Roundtable always opens DOC type
objects with rtb/p/rtb_open.p, so that the file is opened
based on its file name extension and your MS-Windows File
Types. See chapter 5 in the Roundtable manual for a more
detailed description of DOC type objects.


Question 2: How does the Roundtable schema work?
What are the keys between the tables, etc.?
I would like to write my own programs that use the
information in the Roundtable database.

Answer 2: Well, frankly, some of the Roundtable schema
is complicated, and the relationships between some of the
tables is not straight forward at all. If you want to
build your own reports based on the information in
Roundtable, great! StarBase provides all of the Roundtable
reports in source form, and recommends that you use these
as starting points for your own reports.
StarBase does not try to provide any sort of detailed
schema diagrams, as this is one of those cases where
the source code is much more helpful than a schema diagram
ever could be. You can, of course, use any PROGRESS tools
at your disposal to generate detailed reports about the tables,
fields, and indexes involved in the Roundtable schema.

Most importantly, please consider the Roundtable database
to be READ ONLY. Any change made to your Roundtable
repository outside of the provided Roundtable programs
is insupportable.


Question 3: What the heck is the difference between
Product Modules and the modules that I see in the Tabletop?

Answer 3: The modules that you see in the Tabletop are
called Workspace Modules. Their main purpose in life is
to help you organize the files in your workspace - they
define which subdirectory the program files go into.
Product Modules are a little more subtle - their main
purpose in life is to organize the way that your objects
are stored in the repository.

In a very simple Roundtable environment, you might have
one Product Module for each Workspace Module. If some
of your customers got special versions of some of your
programs (called custom variants), you might have more
than one Product Module supplying source to a Workspace
Module. Product Modules are "sources" for Workspace
Modules. The introduction in the manual provides an
excellent description of how Product Modules and
Workspace Modules work together - see it for more detail.
See chapters two and three for detailed descriptions
of how to set up your Product Modules, your workspaces,
and your Workspace Modules.


Question 4: Why won't Roundtable connect to my
application database?

Answer 4: If you are connecting to a single user database,
check that you did not add .db to the end of your PDBASE
object name. Roundtable uses the PDBASE object name as the
logical database name, and .db will cause the connection
to fail.

Another common mistake is to forget the -P "" -U ""
parameters in the PDBASE objectÆs connection parameters.
Without these, Roundtable tries to connect to the database
using your OS login id, and your connect will fail.

If you are still unable to get Roundtable to connect to
your application's database, try using the PROGRESS editor
to connect to the database with all of the same parameters
as you are using with Roundtable.


Question 5: What version of Roundtable am I using?
Who am I logged in as?

Answer 5: Select Help->About from any of Roundtable's
menus to find your current Roundtable login. From the
Tabletop menu, select Help->About, and you will also
see the current version of Roundtable. Roundtable's
current version number is stored in a file called
RTB\DOC\RTBVER.


Question 6: How big of a file can I store?

Answer 6: You can store binary and text files in the
repository up to 1Mb in size.


Question 7: How big will my Roundtable database be?

Answer 7: The size of the Roundtable repository database
will of course depend to a huge extent on the size of your
application. If you have thousands of program files in
your application, your Roundtable database will be larger.
For smaller applications, your Roundtable repository may
be around 50Mb in size. For huge applications, your
repository will be hundreds of Mb in size. You will find
that after you have loaded your application initially into
Roundtable, the repository database will grow slowly during
normal development. This is because Roundtable stores the
first version of your program files in the repository as
full source and then most of the versions checked in after
that are only stored in the repository as deltas.


Question 8: How does Roundtable store binary files
in the database? Does it store deltas for binaries?

Answer 8: Roundtable uuencodes your binary files
before storing them in the repository database.
Roundtable does not store deltas for binary files -
it stores the entire binary file with each new version.


Question 9: How do I get Roundtable to find my include files?

Answer 9: If you need to have your include file directories
in your propath so that your application programs will compile,
you will need to add those directories to the workspace path.
This is done through the Workspaces Maintenance window.
When you select a workspace in Roundtable, the workspace path
is added to your propath automatically by Roundtable.


Question 10: The same schema tables appear repeatedly when
I build a schema update list, even though those tables
do not need updating. Why?

Answer 10: This is due to difficulties that Roundtable has
internally with some schema object dependencies.
Typically, the problem goes away after creating a release
in the afflicted workspace. This problem does not affect
your schema management in any way - you can ignore it.


Question 11: Can I delete old object versions from
the repository?

Answer 11: No. Roundtable does not let you delete old
object versions from the repository. Roundtable works
this way for a number of reasons. One reason is that it
always needs an initial version to work forward through
the deltas from, to pull more recent versions out.
Also, old versions are always kept on file for reference
and so that early versions of your application can always
be re-created.


Question 12: Can I make schema changes via the PROGRESS
dictionary (or some other tool), and have Roundtable
recognize these changes?

Answer 12: No. If you make changes to your application's
schema with a tool other than Roundtable, you will need to
run the Schema Integrity Check report, and use that to get
Roundtable and your physical schema back in sync.


Question 13: Are there any limits on the size of text files
that I can check in to the repository?

Answer 13: Yes. You will run into the PROGRESS record size
limit if you have very, very long lines in your text file.
This is because Roundtable loads 100 lines of text into each
record in the repository. You would have to have over 31k
in 100 lines of text to reach this limit - which would be a
most unusual situation. You can load files like this in to
the repository as a Binary file (assuming that the file is
smaller than 1Mb).


Question 14: I receive a lock table overflow when initially
loading my database's schema into Roundtable. What's wrong?

Answer 14: Roundtable loads one schema table at a time.
If any of your tables have a huge number of fields, you may
have to increase the size of the lock table for your
Roundtable repository (rtb.db) - for the duration of your
schema load.


Question 15: Can I deploy selected modules?

Answer 15: Yes. Workspaces are your configuration lists
- so to deploy a subset of modules, create a workspace with
that set of modules, and deploy from there.


Question 16: What versions of PROGRESS client and database
servers can I use with Roundtable?

Answer 16: Roundtable 8.0A is compilable under both v7.3B+
and v8+ of the PROGRESS for Windows. The Roundtable system
installs as encrypted source, so that you can create a
Roundtable v6, v7, or v8 repository database (rtb.db),
start up a server for it, and compile the Roundtable
application code against the server. Remember that you
cannot use a v8 client with a v6 database server.
However, Roundtable does work in any of the combinations of
v6, v7, and v8 that are supported by PROGRESS.


Question 17: I receive the message
"Sorry! The object part(s) is in use by your session"
when I try to edit an object. Why?

Answer 17: This is most likely to happen if you are editing,
or have edited, a DOC object or a PCODE object that does not
use the PROGRESS ADE tools for editing. If you are certain
that you are not currently editing the object in another
window (ex: in a Notepad window), then choose
File->Unlock Object to unlock the object. After editing a
DOC object, or any PCODE that belongs to a Subtype that uses
a special Edit Program, you will have to unlock the object.


Question 18: There are thousands of source file objects
in my application. Isn't there a faster way to register
all these files than CodeLoad?

Answer 18: There is an undocumented utility called
Module Load which is much more automated than CodeLoad.
See rtb\doc\modload.doc for details.


Question 19: How do I bulk load DOC objects?

Answer 19: There is no way to bulk load DOC objects -
CodeLoad and Module Load only work with PCODE objects.
Instead, you can set up a PCODE Subtype to handle your
documents, and then use CodeLoad or Module Load.
(Also see Question & Answer #1)


Question 20: Is there a Web site where I can find
updated information about Roundtable?

Answer 20: Yes. See StarBase's Web page at
http://www.starbase.com, or
http://www.Roundtable-TSMS.com
or
Progress Software's Web page at http://www.progress.com.


Question 21: Can I add a button for Roundtable to PRO*Tools?

Answer 21: Yes. Set the Program field to rtb\p\rtb_inst.p,
and set the icon to <RTB>\rtb\images\rtbman.ico,
where <RTB> is the directory that you have Roundtable
installed into. This program must be run persistently.


Question 22: Roundtable keeps disconnecting my database.
How do I tell Roundtable that I want it to remain connected?

Answer 22: Roundtable disconnects all databases
(except rtb.db), and connects only the Workspace
databases. If you want to have an additional database
connected while working in Roundtable, add a PDBASE object
to your workspace with the appropriate connection parameters.
You do not have to load schema for the database into
Roundtable - the PDBASE object just tells Roundtable
to connect the database when you select the workspace.

Progress Software Technical Support Note # 15729