Example Programs

Written with Visual Basic 6.0 and Office 2000 VBA. An ActiveX Control, control program and macros originally targeted to Word that provide an integration between CM Synergy and Office.

This was very much a work in progress that I started shortly before leaving Telelogic. It is intended as vastly more functional replacement for the ccmbar utility provided with the Continuus Integrations. It is was also intended to become a close integration utility between ChangeSynergy, CM Synergy and Microsoft Office. This material is copyright 2001 Bill Sharer and may be re-distributed under the terms of the Gnu Public License.

These are a set of Perl scripts originally written by one of my colleagues in Continuus Professional Services. They introduce an alternative process for release management in CM Synergy that is more suited to RAD development environments than the official process taught by training and shown in the product documentation. The Services organization maintains the scripts and has implemented it at a number of clients.

My contributions were to make the changes necessary to implement the scripts with Continuus CM Synergy versions 5.x and Windows based clients. The changes and new features made to the Continuus Task Based Methodology between version 4.5 and 5.x required some modifications to the command syntax. The scripts were also originally written solely for Perl 5.0x running on a Unix environment. I ported them to also run against Perl 5.5 running in a Cygwin shell environment under Windows NT. They may also run with a Windows 9x version of Cygwin, but I did not have a requirement to test this.

This is one of a set of customizations that I performed to the Continuus ChangeSynergy 3.x product line. Some of my work appeared in later versions and is presumably still part of the Telelogic ChangeSynergy 4.x product line. I believe these packages are a major reason for my winning the first Technology Innovator Award in 2000. It may have the dubious honor of being the only Technology Innovator award ever given, since Continuus was being bought and merged into Telelogic AB 1Q2001. My work was very popular with the sales force and was quickly included in their standard demos of ChangeSynergy.

The Continuus object repository shared by ChangeSynergy (CS) and CM Synergy (CCM) has the concept of Change Requests (aka Problems, CS) which tie into Tasks (CCM) and from tasks to associated objects (CCM). The workflow in CCM also uses a Change Folder type object which organizes tasks and they are crucial in implementing an organization's processes and work flow.

The query and reporting facility in CS provides for Problems and Tasks, but omitted any capability for Change Folders. While it might be argued that folders are part of CM proper and thus not part of the feature scope of CS, in day-to-day use by CM managers, it was found to be a glaring omission.

In this fairly large JavaScript customization to the query and reporting templates, I enable queries and reports for change folders and their associated tasks and problems. Because of limitations to the Wslets (Java Servlets) distributed with CS and my inability to gain access to the source code, I wasn't able to do a folder->task->object type report.

Another ChangeSynergy query and reporting facility customization that was popular with line managers. The out of the box reporting did not make provisions for doing simple counts in table formats, for example counting the number of Change Requests by CR status. As a result, a manager using CS would have to generate a summary report and count items by hand for their spreadsheet.

There are three template files possible for each report: a header, an attribute template for each record and a footer template. Once I developed the trick of spreading the Javascript needed among these three, it became easy for others and clients to build their own tabular reports.

I began to experiment with XML and XSL at a client site shortly before leaving Telelogic. I had finished the work for the client and was in the process of packaging and documenting it as an example for internal use within the Continuus field services and sales organizations. I was not able to finish before leaving.

The client had an elaborate process for building up and releasing their products: locomotives. Much like aircraft carriers, large jets and buildings, no two locomotives are actually alike. Our first challenge was to roll this convoluted beast of a change and build process from Microsoft Access 2.0 to ChangeSynergy and CM Synergy. Then we had to come up with a set of reports that matched their existing deliverables to the customer. The client wanted to be able to change the format of the report on their own, but they would not need to change the mechanism used to pull the data.

I had been reading up on XML since it was newly introduced behind the scenes for ChangeSynergy 3.5 to store and load the Change Request Process from the new user customization gui. The concept of keeping the data separate from the formatting made perfect sense to me, and it matched what the client wanted to be able to do. I wrote an XML DTD and a set of Perl scripts to run the back end queries with CM Synergy and to generate a validating XML file. I then used DreamWeaver to lay out an XSL stylesheet for the report and showed the client who also knew DreamWeaver how to run the script and do the stylesheet translation.