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.