Netbeans Pascal and Rdb

[Chris Barratt]

I am playing around with the Distributed Netbeans IDE and the VMS extensions to see what can be done. I have managed to get our Pascal stuff going fine, using a special command file for builds (to fit our environment).

We also have a lot of embedded RDML code in Pascal (.RPA) and a fair bit of SQL Module language stuff (.SQLMOD), and I am trying to work out a way to edit/build these using Netbeans.

Well, editting is easy if you treat them as a text file, but to be able to compile/build them the file extension needs to be assoicated with an object type.

The .RPA stuff should really be easily picked up by the PASCAL one, and I found how to do that in the help (add the .RPA to the source file extensions for a Pascal object) but it does not seem to work.

It would also be nice to have a separate .SQLMOD object type, but I guess this is not up to HP to provide. (If I could get the extension stuff working, I would just add sqlmod to the extension list for PASCAL so I could use the build command file I have written).

So what am I asking here....
What am I missing in order to make the Pascal extension for Netbeans recognise .RPA file ?

thanks,
Chris

[Meg Watson · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

That's a great question!

I think you have (basically) two choices...1) you can treat them as "text" (which you've done) in NetBeans and then create a command procedure which you run to build them. The command procedure won't be tied to the files though, so you'll have to select it (the .com file) and do a right-mouse click/remote execute to build them. Or 2) you could tell Distributed NetBeans that they're "Pascal" files by modifying the Pascal extensions. But, then you run the risk of blowing up our parser engine, and also, you might end up with some strange colorization. You could try telling us they're "DCL" files instead (no syntax parsing for DCL), you'd be able to change the remote properties/execution to point at whatever command file builds them. But, both of these are "workarounds". To do this, go to Tools/Options/IDE Configuration/System/Object Types/OpenVMS Pascal Source Objects. You can change the list of "Pascal" or "DCL" extensions there.

I smell a new feature here.

Also, we can continue this conversation if you email me at netbeans@hp.com.

Best Regards,
Meg Watson
HP OpenVMS Engineering