DCSoftware , Inc. Information

DCSoftware, Inc., originally created ARCTOOLS/400TM to fill a major gap in one particular ERP software package. This particular package included extensive purge routines, but never included the archiving feature. Despite multiple user requests to the software vendor, archiving never made it into the standard software. Many clients had manually added the archiving feature to the purge programs, a task which typically required the services of a programmer for over a month's time. And, this task had to be repeated for every subsequent release of the software since the code modifications had to be migrated. DCSoftware, Inc. discovered a better way to accomplish this task. With the early versions of ARCTOOLS, users of this package were able for the first time to archive their purged data without making any changes to their software. ARCTOOLS was simply installed, pointed at the various libraries, and run after the standard purge program. The purged data was recovered and placed in the archive library. Users of this particular application software package were lucky, since their package had a fairly complete set of purge utilities. ARCTOOLS made the management of the data complete by archiving the purged data. Users of other packages were not so lucky. Many packages on the market do not include purge utilities, or perhaps the collection of purge utilities is incomplete or inconsistent, or they might use unworkable approaches like CPYF routines. In later versions, ARCTOOLS was enhanced with the PurgeWizard to help these users. The PurgeWizard allows a purge to be defined for any physical file as easily as a query record selection. A proprietary RPG code generator is then used to create a custom RPG program for purging and archiving the file. The purge does not require exclusive file allocations, so the purge can be run in batch while users are logged on! This eliminated the long batch window requirements for many purge routines. At this point, users of other application software packages or custom applications could ...