Introduction to Data Management

Developing Applications With PATHMAKER
15873 Tandem Computers Incorporated 5-7
Developing a
PATHMAKER
Application
PATHMAKER guides you in developing your applications, leading you step-by-step
through the development process. Nevertheless, you must draw upon your own
professional skills if you are to produce an effective and useful application. You must
design the database, describe that design to PATHMAKER, and describe the activities
you want performed on the database. The following discussion presents an idea of
the particular steps you must perform.
Creating a Project Before you can develop your application, you must create a project for that
application. To do this, you run a special program supplied as part of PATHMAKER
that prompts you for information such as project name, security level and TMF
auditing for the project catalog, name of the PATHWAY monitor (PATHMON)
program that will control your application, home terminal for receiving error and
status messages, and printer for receiving hard copies of screen images.
Based upon the information you supply, PATHMAKER creates catalog files for the
project and sets up the PATHWAY environment for the project.
Working on the Application Developing the actual application entails defining the database, creating the
requesters and their screens, creating the services and servers, and configuring the
application for testing. These steps are summarized in Figure 5-3.
Figure 5-3. Steps in Developing a PATHMAKER Application
S8020-032
PATHMAKER
Main Menu
Data
Definition
Requester
Definition
Service
Definition
Server
Definition
Application
Configuration
The application development steps are available through the PATHMAKER main
menu screen, illustrated in Figure 5-4. PATHMAKER provides some leeway in the
sequence in which you perform these steps. In some cases, for instance, you might
want to specify the description of the database and then design the user interface to
match the description. In other cases, you might want to create the requesters and
prototype screens before defining the database and its structures. Alternatively, you
can merge these two approaches as you go along.
Through the main menu, you access lower level screens that help you specify the
details of each development task. To navigate among the PATHMAKER screens, and
therefore among development tasks, you simply use the function keys on your
terminal. As you develop the application, you can also use function keys to request
various other operations like displaying information about requesters, servers, and
other objects, or requesting online help.