Productivity Tools

There are, however, many ways to improve your productivity when creating your applications. The Wizards that ship with Clarion are rather simple and do not offer any customization. This has changed somewhat with the new Clarion 6, but it is still rather rigid and there is no visual editor to edit the themes that are used to change properties on the windows and reports.

We offer a number of solutions to increase your productivity. In our development we estimate that we have increased our own productivity by between 15% and 40% depending on the type of procedures we are creating! Clearly demonstrated by the chart above, this is no small increate in productivity when it comes to real projects!

Professional Wizards
You can increase your productivity considerably by using our Professional Wizards. They let you set almost 200 different properties that are used when the wizards create your application or procedures. This reduces the time you need to spend on modifying your new procedures. You can for example control almost every property of buttons in your application so you hardly ever need to change the properties of the buttons that are created in your procedures. This also gives you very consistent look and feel for your application since buttons are all the same size, use the same icons and other properties.

The Professional Wizards also have the unique capability to add extension templates to your application and procedures. This means that you can add the extension templates that you need in the Wizard Editor. When you create your procedures the extension templates you selected will be automatically added to the new procedures so you don't have to add them manually! In the Wizard Editor you can add information to the prompts on the templates so you can customize the wizard to generate the information into the extension template that are appropriate.

In the Professional Wizards you can register most templates to use with the Wizards, even your own templates! This gives you a product that is not dependent on any particular templates or template structures.

Reporter
The Icetips Reporter is a powerful tool to help you create reports. In it's current version, it is limited to one report and one file pr. report, but next major version will include the possibility to add related files. Even with it's limitations, it is a very powerful tool to create reports. You can use the Wizard Editor to create report Layouts which document the properties of the report. You specify what page size to use, margins, what to put into the header and footers, if there should be a page form created. You can even add your own variables that are generated automatically into the report. On top of that you can add your own embedded code directly in the Editor! This code is then generated into the appropriate embeds.

You can use the Reporter with most versions of Clarion and it can create reports for the ABC and Clarion template chains and you can even use it to generate CPCS reports in both template chains if you are using that popular reporting template.

Previewer
While the Previewer may not increase your productivity directly, it will increase your productivity indirectly because you can modify it and add the functionality you need without spending time to find out how to massage the ABC or Clarion previewers to do the job.