Mice Can Create Suprtool Defines

Mice Can Create Suprtool Defines

By Bob Green, Robelle President

When we heard about M.I.C.E., a software product that can generate Suprtool Define commands for fields from Cobol Copylibs, naturally we at Robelle thought it was an amazingly good idea.

We asked Tom Clarke of Fluent Edge how they came to create M.I.C.E. and how they get all the fine field details needed to generate the Suprtool Defines. Tom had this to say:

"Thank you for asking about M.I.C.E. (originally stood for "MACS Internals, Controls, Etc.) and our Suprtool Define Generator. M.I.C.E. contains technical information about the Ecometry system, specifically the database. We developed this originally to support our own needs. Being Ecometry consultants, we needed to have quick, reliable information with us when we travel. M.I.C.E. filled that need. Over time, we supplemented M.I.C.E with other tools such as the MACS Control Block Search engine and the Suprtool Define Generator."
"As you know, Suprtool plays a huge role in the Ecometry system. We use Suprtool extensively and like it very much. We are always impressed at the reliability, speed and ease of use that it offers".
"Ecometry Corporation has many dataset items that are commonly used and are defined by the COBOL copylib files (common names are FLAGS or BIG-DATA). Our Suprtool Define Generator takes a COBOL copylib file ($INCLUDE file) and generates the Suprtool defines based on that. While we wrote this to support Ecometry users, this program would work with any COBOL copylib file."
Tom Clarke, co-founder
Fluent Edge Technologies, Inc.
Email: tom@fluentedge.com

Here is a sample screen shot of M.I.C.E. in action:

We learned about M.I.C.E. via an Ecometry mailing list posting by Anthony Ballo (aballo@musiciansfriend.com). Anthony says: "When I first saw it, I was blown away. It's become a important tool to me, like Qedit. The Suprtool define generator is really nice!" Anthony supplied the screen shot above of the Cobol Copylib Analyzer generating Suprtool defines. On his web site, Anthony has sample Suprtool Defines generated by M.I.C.E.for the Item Master dataset, the Order headers dataset, and the Order Sub-head dataset. For example,

   DEFINE ITM-EDP-NO,1,4,DOUBLE
   DEFINE ITM-ALT-EDP,5,4,DOUBLE
   DEFINE ITM-ACTUAL-EDP,9,4,DOUBLE
   DEFINE ITM-UNIT-FACTOR,13,2,INTEGER
   DEFINE ITM-DESC1,15,20
   DEFINE ITM-WHSE-SUFFIX1,35,2

Tom Clarke of Fluent Edge notes that M.I.C.E. currently documents Ecometry 4.2 using a Windows Help-file format. They sell a single-user license for $349 and a site-license for $1499. They are working on the 5.x version now, but deployment and upgrade pricing is still be worked out. You can read more about M.I.C.E., and download a working trial copy, on their web site at www.fluentedge.com (no longer available) - just click on the Products pull down menu and select M.I.C.E..

bgreen@robelle.com
December 29, 2000