CNX Turns The Crank On Valence

August 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

CNX recently launched a major new release of Valence, its development framework for creating Web-based applications for IBM i. With version 6.2, CNX has added a number of new features that assist with improving the appearance and functionality of screens, new RPG toolkit procedures, and better SQL parsing for database interactions.

CNX’s Valence story stretches all the way back to 2001, when the Chicago, Illinois-based development and consulting shop started developing a third-party planning system that SSA (now Infor) BPCS customers could plug into their ERP systems. That early work on ATOMIC, as it was called, eventually turned into framework that used the latest Web technologies, such as JSON and JavaScript, to create Web apps for IBM i.

Dubbed Valence, that framework, which CNX formally launched back in 2008, today includes a suite of tools for creating a variety of Web and mobile applications that run under IBM i’s Apache Web server and access existing RPG business logic. The product has several components, including a JavaScript library; a set of RPG procedures for integrating various JavaScript libraries with existing RPG apps; and a Web portal framework that provides customers with pre-built navigation and security. CNX also offers several add-ons, such as the Nitro App Builder, Nitro iAdmin, Nitro File Editor, and a spool file viewer.

With Valence 6.2, the company has focused a lot of attention on the Nitro App Builder (NAB), which has been the focus of several releases recently. The company says that “many new visual and functional improvements have been made to grids and forms [in NAB], and a streamlined mechanism for laying out tab panels has been introduced.”

On the grids front, tree grids now support column containers, or what are sometimes called, “Super Columns.” Column containers, which CNX introduced last year with 6.1, span across the top of the grid to better distinguish one group of columns from another, thereby helping the user to understand what data is being presented, the company says.

Column containers can also now have their own tool tips, just like regular grid columns, the company says. Separately, tree grid summaries, which summarize the contents of other cells in the grid, now support the same summary row functionality contained in regular grids, CNX says. The company has also changed the behavior of grids when active paging is turned on and how the cell validation function responds to errors in fields.

On the forms front, CNX has made several additions and changes, starting with the new “slim view” UI option, which mirrors a similar view already available for grids. The company also gave more control to the developer over the “number of columns” property and added new options for bold field labels and clearing out text/number fields, among other changes.

Valence 6.2 also includes multiple new RPG Toolkit procedures for interacting with web services, including two procedures for adding name/value pairs to buffers and headers for subsequent get/post calls; and two new procedures for making HTTP get and HTTP post calls to specified URLs. The company changed existing procedures to control whether the byte order mark (BOM) parameter is used, which the company says is used mostly for the Japanese market.

Other changes introduced with Valence 6.2 include the option to set the number of days that can go by before the system forces the user to re-enter their two-factor authentication (2FA) code. The company made several other small changes, which you can read about here.

Valence 6.2, which is the 19th major release of the product, was released as a beta during COMMON’s recent POWERUp conference in Denver, Colorado, and is available now. The software, which is provided under community, enterprise, and OEM licenses and is compatible with IBM i 7.1 through 7.5, can be downloaded here.

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