BasicPI

The Dictionary part of BSA is quite important as your project grows because it is instrumental in keeping overview and re-using components. The content is always the same, but I decided that I needed at least two precentations of the Dictionary content that is selectable by buttons on top of the Dictionary folder itself. You see examples below and this is not written in stone. The first organize content by diagrams, the second list content by category. The actual project below is just a mock-up used for integrity testing.

Names and terminology will need to be consolidated + some more testing and this Beta is ready to go.

BSA contains a build-in component “Communication Link” and I wanted to see how it would be to code this manually in BSA. As you code you can chose to code modules in target language , or you can code components in BSA itself as we do in this example. See discussion below the diagram.

In this case we assume that the host platform have an object “Serial” with Open and Close functions as well as an event “Serial.Error”.

Open is straight forward as we open the serial line and exit with OnOpen or OnClose. Same with Close we exit with OnClose.

The more interesting part is the event “Serial.Error” where we call Close, wait 500ms and call Open three times before we give up. This is designet to keep a serial line open. Open is the same diagram as we have on left, but we override OnOpen and OnError in the “Serial.Error” diagram – if we get OnOpen we forward it, if we get OnError we loop and try x times before we give up.

This should work just fine, I will not advocate that everything should be coded in BSA as that is an user choice, Myself I will code large libraries in C++ and C# and glue them together in BSA. To make this a library you just select the diagram in the dictionary and tag it as library with a version number or you can just re-use it directly from Dictionary by dragging it into the diagram. It is guaranteed to be details and changes on this bit as we go into code generation later.

The same diagram through the clipboard – I thing “someone” has forgotten to convert colors for a component 🙂

I am using BSA myself daily as we speak and this sometimes makes it very obvious that some of the functionality needs to be improved. I was initially very happy with my Property Editor (at right), but as I have worked on large 4K screens I have noticed that text gets very small and hidden far out on the right side as I write text. As I in this example write a small block of PScript I alsi notice that the editor is rather limited to work with.

The small function above receive one of two signals and make a calculation that either raise an Alarm or a new signal. This is perfect for the Assign statement to add a few lines of code directly – and yes it works. But as I write these few lines I also notice that the small text editor in the Property Editor is not very well suited for this. I will put this on the list, but it will have to stay as is for the first Beta elease.

I created a simple Hello World diagram (below), saved it, Imported it to itself and made a copy/paste – so below I have 2 x Module 1, 2 x Diagram 1 and 3 x Hello World. This is just an integrity check on the drawing engine as the engine uses an unique reference and not the names. So from a free drawing perspective this is fine – you can do this in a text editor while a proper editor will tag Module 1 and Hello World as duplicated – meaning you can draw what you want, but the compiler will stop you from generating code since you from a programming perspective have errors.

In this firsr version we focus on design and the capability to make drawings and illustrations (modelling) – a typical usage is that we discuss two or three alternative implementation or just want some drawing freedom as part of the design process – meaning the tool should not limit us. BSA is a very fast drawing tool on these specialized diagrams and we can easely combine drawings with notes and free text where we do not want to be stopped by programming language rules. So – in short we need to allow this because design and documentation is an important bonus we get free from BSA.

The question is how do we precent this in Dictionary and digrams? What we have above is “Hello World”, but assume you do this by accident with hundreds of objects – we need a way for the user to be able to do this deliberately while it also must be obvious that this is an illegal diagram. I plan to run the compiler as a background task so the integrity check will always pop up a almost instantly.

We also have a similar need as we code – we need to make new versions of code and be able to comment out code as we test etc – and using a text editor this is simple, so we should be able to de exactly the same here. From a coding perspective this is straight forward as we could mark illegal situations clearly and force the user to correct situations or comment the out. But, we need something that work for free design as well.

I will experiment with flags in the dictionary and the adding a “Comment” or “Design” tag in the left-top corner to comment out entire diagrams – we seriously need that option and a system to maintain multiple versions of diagrams anyway. It is also a question if we should add a legend option similar to those in other CAD tools. These can easily be added in fixed positions on top of the digrams and be included/removed from printing/clipboard at the users option. Myself I would preffer to see a tag if I look at an older version of a diagram.

I have started to add four functions “Import, Cut, Copy and Paste”, The example below import a copy of the existing module into the repository. The main challenge to maintain integrity is straight forward as integrity is based on a unique, internal reference that needs to be updated. Names are only a precentation on this level. The more interesting issue is precentation of objects like Module 1, Diagram 1 and Class88 that now are duplicated as we in this example end up wih two of each. I only need to change the 2nd Module name as the full name of Class88 is “Module1.Diagram 1.Class88” etc, but I hesitate to start using the full, formal names everythere.

Cut, Copy and Paste is simlar to Import with the exception that you can operate within a module and as such you need to change names of ojects. If you copy a object between modules we need to make a physical copy, but if the copy a class inside a module we could make a new precentation of the original or we could create a new original. All of this must be handled in the UI.

Import is a must for several people to work on the same project and I probably need a merge option – that said I want to experiement with GIT first because two or more developers should be able to merge projects using GIT. The challenge is the references because as two users work in parallell they might be using the same references for different things – in which case GIT Merge will screw things up :(. I am also fully aware that a GIT Merge tend to screw up if two developers have worked on the same file, so it might be safer to handle Merge in BSA. I need to think about this one.

It still is a bit of work left before I am happy with the integrity and functionality of BSA:

• I need some improvements on clipboard copy, basically to copy selections rather than full diagrams.
• Import needs to work.
• Copy/Paste must work.
• Multiple Modules must work.
• And I will need to optimize Dictionary precentation.
• And test and fix bugs.

I also need to design an undo/redo mechanism, but I can release a beta without this. The reason I push on Import, cut, copy paste now is because they affect the core concept of how fast you can work – as in productivity. BSA is pretty fast to draw diagrams with as is, but as my test project grows I miss options to copy/paste to capitilize on things I already have done. One discussion coming up is my text editor in the Property Editor – it works, but it ends op on the right side as very small text. I also enter a lot of text that I need to precent in tables and get into documents. Documentation is important because it is something we can do a lot of automation on – the hard reality for many of us is that we make less doc than we should do because of lack of time – and doc in my case is precented to management that is stakeholders in work you do.

I was considering HMI as my next release, but it might be that I start pushing on Code Generators. To generate source code I will be re-using an old concept I developed back in 1995 – a specialized template language where you manually write the code and then modify content with a specialized markup language. This means the code that is generated is 100% controlled by yourself as it should be – the last functionality I then need is to be able to import tool kits and let the user create new tools. I will keep the build-in tools as a base, but users should be able to create their own libraries of code and tools.

One concept I am eager to push is to make more of BSA using BSA, but that is for a later day 🙂