HP's Express 2 release of MPE/iX 5.5 delivers improvements for VPlus, including some Year 2000 date handling. The release, which HP considers a pull release and so must be requested, will be ready to ship in mid-May. Customers will receive a copy of the Communicator documentation along with an order packet. Returning the packet will bring the Express 2 tape (MPE/iX version C.55.02) to the 3000 site.
VPlus version B.06.07 will provide intrinsic, FORMSPEC and processing enhancements to handle the Year 2000 and beyond in applications that use VPlus. Programmers will also be able to define default field Type and Data types for a form as well as more than 52 single character fields per form. New intrinsics get and set Save Field values automatically, and the new interactive FORMSPEC lets programmers renumber a form.
HP added two intrinsics, VGETYYYYMMDD and VPUTYYYYMMDD, to handle dates in the next century as part of VPlus. The date values handled by the new intrinsics contain 4-digit year components. The intrinsics are similar in structure and function to existing VPlus intrinsics.
The Express 2 release also contains official documentation for Telnet/iX Server, enabling the software to support block mode, binary mode and typeahead as well as support up to 2,000 concurrent Telnet Sessions. This functionality was first delivered with PowerPatch 1 for MPE/iX 5.5 (See our PowerPatch 1 story in our December 1996 issue for more details).
HP also increased the number of Distributed Terminal Controllers (DTCs) that each HP 3000 can support with MPE/iX 5.5 Express 2, hiking it to 400 from the previous limit of 120 DTCs. The increase boosts the number of terminals that can be attached to each 3000. HP also increased the number of device classes supported from 1,000 to 2,000 and added three new modem types for devices attached to DTCs.
HP also released the CAST function for Allbase/SQL and IMAGE/SQL as
part of
Express 2. The function converts data from one type to another, including
conversion
from normally incompatible data types such as CHAR and INTEGER. The CAST
functions
were first available last year as a patch for the G1.15 release of
Allbase/SQL, and HP is
including them as part of its official Express release. Programmers can't
use CAST to
convert numeric types directly to date/time types. HP says this should be
done by nesting
the CAST functions so that the numeric value is first converted to a
character string and
then converted to the date/time data type.