UK DataFlex Group

The UK DataFlex Group started in October 2018, to bring together people who manage and develop DataFlex software in the UK. Of course, DataFlexers from further afield are welcome!

Generally this group aims to have informal, one day events covering just a few main topics, with focus on finding out more about what each other are working on and how the group can work together to help each other.

A summary of each event, with relevant links to presentations etc. will be listed on this page.

Events

4th March 2021

Zoom meetup

Time: Thursday 4th March 19:00 PM London

The meetup will have a strong focus on 'social', but there is an agenda on the Unicorn InterGlobal site.

Summary of the meetup

There were two main presentations:

File handling in DataFlex - by Peter Bragg

Donorflex has an application that has to process large numbers of text files and .csv files in particular. The application doesn’t have an API (yet!), so there is a lot of importing and exporting of files. Peter talks about their preparation for DataFlex 2021.20.0 and the changes they will implement to be ready for Unicode, such as, the introduction of byte order marks (BOMs) to indicate Unicode encoding of text files. For this presentation, you can:

• see the video presentation on Youtube.
• get the code from https://github.com/DataFlexCode/cdsSeqFileHandler

Hybrid presentation/discussion of creating a REST Wizard - by Mike Peat

Hybrid because Mike had got to a certain point with creating a REST wizard and was asking for opinions and ideas as to what to do next.

Before we launched into general social stuff, Johan Broddfelt told us about the updates that he's doing to his Discovering DataFlex video series and asked for opinions and suggestions about what topics people would like to be recorded.

22nd October 2020

Zoom meetup

Time: Thursday 22nd October 14:00 PM London

The meetup will have a strong focus on 'social', but there is an agenda on the Unicorn InterGlobal site.

Summary of the meetup

The meetup started with the following presentations:

• “Leveraging SQL for Web Services”, by Sean Bamforth - See the video presentation

• “An introduction to the SyncFusion Library“, by Wil Van Antwerpen - See the video presentation

Extra thanks to Sean who then left for emergency dental treatment - #trooper.

In the next session, Geraldine demoed her latest app, for the medical industry, which she delivered on schedule with more features than originally specified – really highlighting the benefits of developing with DataFlex.

We briefly touched on security for DataFlex developers, with Dennis (DAW) reminding of us the new level of security in DF 2020 Beta 1. Dennis also requested that we all engage with Beta 2 (which is coming soon) for a solid review phase. The security talk moved on to talk of security in the Cloud, with a few real life, yet amusing, horror stories of ransomware attacks.

Other subjects discussed:

• Quick presentation on SQLQuery Tool from Bob Worsley by Wil - See video presentation

• Question relating to Antivirus software ‘quarantining’ .exe files. Suggested advice included:
  • From Wil ‘signing the files’
  • From Clive using ‘GoGetSSL’ GoGetSSL
  • Docs to read (from Dennis) DataFlex Help Code Signing and Has someone tried 'Let's encrypt'?

• Question regarding SSL certificates and encryption.
  • The service 'Certify the web' (https://certifytheweb.com/) is used by some in the group.
  • It was also suggested that it’s possible to avoid using certificates by running applications through Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/).

9th July 2020

Zoom meetup

Time: Jul 9, 2020 07:00 PM London (This is 2:00PM EDT)

This will be our first 'virtual' meetup using Zoom. The advantage of this being a Zoom meetup, rather than our usual UK based meetups, is that anyone can join.

Summary of the meetup

About 20 people attended, we started with brief introductions and then Wil Van Antwerpen from Antwise, gave a presentation about DfSplat - a debugger for DataFlex projects.

A link to the PDF powerpoint presentation can be found on the Data Access Forum UK Zoom Meetup post. Alternatively, use the direct download link

You can watch the video recording (including questions and answers at the end) from DfSplat presentation.

Following the presentation, people stayed for a general beer and chat - great to put faces to some of the forum names.

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13th May 2020 - Cancelled

King's Hotel, Oxford Rd, Stokenchurch, High Wycombe HP14 3TA

See the date, location and agenda from the link below.

May 2020 UK DataFlex Group meetup

Sadly this event was cancelled due to COVID-19. As soon as it is safe for everyone, we will arrange the next meetup.

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2nd October 2019

Eynsham Hall Hotel & Spa, Witney, Oxfordshire, OX29 6PN

See the date, location and agenda from the link below.

October 2019 UK DataFlex Group meetup

Summary of the day:

• Harm Wibier from Data Access Europe gave a DataFlex NextGen presentation, covering 64-bit and Unicode. Note, you can find out more or contribute to this subject on the page Make your applications work in DataFlex NextGen.

• Next up, David Knowles from DonorFlex gave an informative presentation on how he has used DataFlex Reports to significantly reduce the number of Crystal Reports that they were previously using.

• Harm then gave an overview of how to cleanup your code for DataFlex 19.1. This is an optional process and is mostly handled through a new compiler warning system. Your existing applications will continue to run the same, but you may need to make a few changes. You can read more about code cleanup in the DataFlex Help - Language and Code Cleanup

• Peter Bragg showed us how DonorFlex developed a new Web application based on their extensive DonorFlex Windows application. It was very interesting to see how the Web app that Peter demoed was using virtually out of the box settings.

• Mike Peat talked about MySQL, DataFlex, MariaDB and Aurora and gave some price and speed comparisons for them, then demonstrated setting up an Amazon RDS Aurora database and converted the DataFlex WebOrder sample to it. This presentation was based on the Synergy 2019 presentation 'MySQL and More for DataFlex'. You can view the slides from the Synergy 2019 presentations page.

• Lastly, we rounded up with a general question and answer session - always useful to hear other people's suggestions and solutions to your own problems!

The date for the next UK DataFlex Group meetup was set for the 13th May 2020.

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1st May 2019

Eynsham Hall Hotel & Spa, Witney, Oxfordshire, OX29 6PN

See the date, location and agenda from the link below.

May 2019 UK DataFlex Group meetup

A quick summary of the day:

• Hilton Gray gave us an overview of Clubwise's business, their current technology stack and where they were going with it, followed by discussions prompted by that.

• Wil van Antwerpen gave a presentation on The Hammer.

• We had a bit of discussion about how we would like the group to continue: we all liked the venue (Eynsham Hall Hotel), so decided to meet there again on Wednesday 2nd October.

• Simon Gottschalk gave a presentation on how his Shipping Vessel Registration system used Sencha's ExtJS as a front-end to his back-end DataFlex system, the current DA web/JS framework not having been available when he started developing it.

• After lunch Wil moved on to presenting DFRefactor.

• Hilton gave us an in-depth view of Clubwise's agile, Scrum-based development processes (prompted by a question about his role at Clubwise).

• Finally Graham MacWhirter outlined Select's business and development challenges and a look at where they were going with WebApp, which also prompted various discussions until we ran out of time.

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30th October 2018

Bromsgrove Hotel & Spa, Birmingham

Peter Bragg from CMAC Computer System Ltd. demonstrated donorflex their fundraising and CRM product, which it quickly became apparent from the extensive detail in the system, is sooo much more than 'just' a CRM system.

Next up, Mike Peat gave a Creating RESTful JSON Web Services with DataFlex 19.1 presentation. You can find the earlier version of this presentation for DF 19.0 here.

Finally, Nick Nikijuluw from Data Access Europe, shared what's coming down the track for DataFlex, no promises, but a welcome insight to what could be in the pipeline.