APG

Overview

We specialize in supporting RC Professional (RCPro), written in Visual Dataflex. RCPro was originally developed by R.C. Systems which made the decision several years not to support it, leaving the system stuck at Visual Dataflex 7, and its users with no go-forward path. Since 2012 APG has been migrating companies using RC Professional from VDF7 to current versions of Visual Dataflex and providing ongoing support for bugs and feature requests.

History

In early 2012 we were contacted by Gilbert Liske of Graphite Products (now a client) to see if we could upgrade their RCPro Job Costing system from VDF7 to a current VDF version.  Never having heard of RCPro we performed due diligence, including several conversations with Chris Andrews, partner and co-founder at RC Systems, the developers of the product.  They had given up supporting RCPro several years prior, after determining they had gone to market with a poor business model and it was no longer sustainable.  They basically gave away RCPro and then supported themselves by customizing it on an hourly basis.  With no guaranteed cashflow or easy/scalable upgrade path eventually it became too expensive to continue supporting the product and it was never migrated past VDF7 though custom development was continued on a client by client basis (but not upgrading the VDF version).

We performed the migration of Graphite Products (GP) with minimal issues whilst keeping a detailed account of our actions.  In retrospect GP was a great place to start as it was a relatively simple and small system.

After the successful GP migration, Chris Andrews emailed all their old RCPro clients advising them APG might offer a support option.  While most of the clients had moved on, or were too small to support our business model requiring a monthly support agreement, several were viable prospects.

Our second migration was Pneumatic Feed Service (PFS, aka CHS Automation).  This migration was neither small nor easy.    Our migration guide continued to evolve and we developed several utility programs to run against the VDF7 codebase to assist with the Analysis and Migration portions of the conversion. As we finished up with PFS we were contacted by both Detroit Name Plate Etching (DNPE) and ITW Thermal Films (ITW) about migrating their RCPro systems.   DNPE was first to commit, though we did perform an Analysis on ITW’s system July 2014 and presented them with a fixed price proposal (while there is risk in fixed price we felt that after 3 conversions we were confident enough to do so).

We then started on Detroit Name Plate Etching (DNPE).  DNPE wasn’t in any rush to complete their migration testing so in October 2014 we switched to a standard support agreement with them.  As of now we support their testing with bug fixes and await their decision to begin parallel testing of systems with both running against production data.  As of July 1, 2015 parallel testing began.  Their system went live in November 2015.

ITW’s official conversion start was January 2015 though some work was done before that.  It is by far the largest we have worked on, and the first that includes tasks running in Task Scheduler.  These tasks automate certain duties like updating tables nightly, emailing reports, and integrating with UPS/FEDEX and their website’s e-store.  This makes testing more challenging and so a testing mode has been overlaid on the code so the system can easily be put in test mode via workspace configuration (which works great with our Prod/QA/Dev approach).  ITW went live April 2016.

Wartrom Machine Systems: analysis began July 2015.  They passed on our proposal at the time.

Feb 2017: Mid-West Instrument contacted us.  We performed an analysis and made a fixed price proposal to convert.

Ongoing: we continue to support our RCPro clients and add functionality to the core product. For instance, based on work for a non-RCPro client (Boston Agrex) Sean Bamforth developed a modular document management system (opens in Google Docs) which can easily be added to DF software packages.

Technical

  • AppSrc
    DDSrc: extensive use of temporary tables to support Crystal Reports.
    Pkg: fairly standardized at this point
  • RCPro.pkg: main include file
    Define C_USE_DEPARTMENTS if departments are used.  Affects GLSysPost.inc and ??? in /Pkg
    Custom.inc: used for client specific extensions to RCPro.pkg
  • Workspace
    [Test]
    Mode=0 | 1
    [Menu]
    FontSize=10
    Font=Calibri
    [Color]
    Red=255
    Green=204
    Blue=204
    [Fax]
    FaxPath=.\Faxes
    FaxSentPath=.\FaxSent
  • RCApplication.pkg
  • RCGetLogin.inc: how to debug
  • Crystal Reports 8.5
  • Easily figure out the project by pressing ALT+1 in the running program.  A window with the project name will appear.
  • Logging disabled (LogHead and LogBody)