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      Release Notes 319 (March 2022)

      Change Description
      Feature

      New UI mode!
      These days, anyone should be able to adjust their terminal or terminal emulator to 160 by 48 or greater, by adjusting the screen geometry and font style/size. If you are one of the few who can't do that, you can now use ProTop RT for the first time. It can now run in a console with fewer than 160 columns and 48 rows; we are calling this mode "ProTop Core". Obviously, it won't show as much information as the full UI but you will see the essentials. 

      ProTop Core introduces the "Of Interest" frame in the top right corner of the screen. This displays a list of any panels, with their associated hotkeys, that currently contain a metric with "alert" highlighting based on its current value. This frame can be toggled with the '\' key and it is available in the main UI mode as well.
      Feature

      The ProTop RT UI is made up of vertically-stacked panels that we call viewers (e.g. Dashboard, Configuration Info, OS Info, etc.) and browsers (e.g. Table Activity, Index Activity, User IO, etc.). The latter display tabular data. In past releases, we used the ABL dynamic browse widget to display the data in our browser panels. That meant we inherited any bugs in that widget, and it had its fair share. If you have ever seen ProTop RT crash with an error (49), that was an OpenEdge bug and it was very likely due to the dynamic browse. 

      In this release, we remove the dynamic browse widget and replace it with our own data grid in browser panels. This not only adds stability, but it also buys a bit more space in the UI for data as the new data grid is borderless. Also new: the title of the browser now includes its keyboard shortcut, e.g.: "<t> Table Activity".
      Feature

      (Windows) ProTop uses the WMIC command-line tool to obtain information about the OS and system hardware. Microsoft has deprecated this tool and may remove it in a future OS release. ProTop release 319 begins the work of moving these OS calls from WMIC to our own DLL. A side benefit of this approach is that it should perform better and reduce process creation.

      This release eliminates the use of WMIC in dbmonitor.p (aka the ProTop 3 DB Monitor service). A future release will reduce or eliminate the use of WMIC in the rest of the product.
      Feature Added a new status line to the bottom of the screen in ProTop RT with some helpful command keys:
      "? = help q = quit p = pause <space> = refresh"
      Feature Changed the color picker ('0') to make the color schemes more accessible. Added an accessible color scheme and choices for reverse-video and underline.
      Feature The keystroke history frame in ProTop RT is now color-coded. This helps users to avoid the problem with ProTop eating keystrokes, i.e. seeming to ignore them. The keystroke history will appear green when it is in a state where it can accept a command keystroke and red when it cannot. You should also find the processing of keystrokes to be more responsive than in past releases.
      Feature Updated the PASOE data collector with improved error handling.
      Feature Enhanced the logging in the PASOE data collector.
      Feature Updates to support detecting PASOE up/down status, utility to encode username & password, and expansion of certain statistics.
      Feature Updated the PASOE data collector to support optional TCP/IP socket parameters, like -SSL.
      Feature Adjusted the "hasVar <> yes" alert (about areas with fixed extents only) so that by default it is not filtered out for AI areas. A commented-out version of the alert is provided so it can be used easily if the user intends to use all fixed AI extents and doesn't want to receive alerts about it, but it is no longer the default.
      Feature Created the readme file $PROTOP/NOTES to explain the use of -rx in protop.pf and any potential issues. Note though that in this release we have -rx commented out.
      Feature The database should always have a _DbStatus record but there is an OpenEdge bug where sometimes it doesn't. Added some defensive code to deal with that situation without errors.
      Feature Improved pt3agent startup logging to show ProTop version, proversion, dbgMode, DLC, propath, and pdbname.
      Feature Added the capability to populate the body of an alert send via bin/sendalert.sh (or .bat)
      Feature Updated the PASOE data collector to report memory usage. Also added a new PASOE alert called memoryUse. This will help to detect and alert on PASOE memory leaks.
      Feature Added the config file etc/pt3rt.cfg to control which data collectors are always active in the background.
      Bug Fixed a bug in OE 11.7+ that prevented us from correctly detecting that the AIMD database feature is enabled.
      Bug Our profiling code (lib/zprof*) does not work in OE 12.2.3 due to an OE bug. This is fixed in 12.2.4.
      This bug fix addressed some issues with the output of profiling data and refined profiler control.
      Bug Updated etc/pasoe.cfg with notes on how to generate encoded credentials for Tomcat.
      Bug Fixed a bug in bin/sqlwidth.sh where we were not setting up the environment properly.
      Bug Updated the syncIO scripts (bin/syncio.sh and .bat) to abort if the sports.db already exists.
      Bug Removed hard-coded references to port 80 for communication with the back end (the ProTop portal). Now if "USESSL=y" is set, we will use port 443 instead.