Hi:

I'm keep listening from Inform support that they don't recommend AFS as a solution. They insist to use DAL or DLL but when you are in a customer that doesn't have source code how do you want to build a solution without knowing which DLL to use or how to create the DAL similar as standard?

Regards,
Javier

AFS is not dead, but I don't think support has ever like it. The only thing I can think of that might help is running some of the sessions they give you to see what a session uses - ie sessinfo(I think that is one name), bic_info, etc.

Rightly pointed out Javier.

I would mention a few scenarios where bad standard code affects replacing AFS with DLL/DAL

A. One day, I get to know a standard DLL to do some activity like release to warehousing say whinhdll.xyz(). And when I call it, it throws me garbage and non descriptive errors.

Now, there could be following reasons for errors -

Reason 1 -

Retry Point was not set by me as it was not mentioned in the standard doc(ttstpbaandoc)

Reason 2 -

Before using DLL, some xyz table needs to be read

Reason 3 -

Before using DLL, some xyz DLL needs to be executed as a background process

B. One day I decide to use DAL for creating Purchase Invoices. Now, there are numerous fields and a lot of tables involved which are not feasible to handle.
Also, there are multiple DLL's involved during Purchase Invoice creation and offcourse not to forget, there are background 3GL programs which gets executed during Purchase Invoice creation.

In case if I decide to go ahead, handle all this and update all the tables, without source code its impossible to handle all this.

And when I just check the script for the Purchase Invoice session, the first line written is -

before.program:
disable.dal()

What could be worse view than this. :)

Offcourse, DAL & DLL should be preferred over AFS as it easily beats AFS in terms of speed of execution(batch processing), error handling, group commits etc, but for some sessions, only AFS or a combination of DAL/DLL & AFS will save a developer.

So, to sum it up, AFS is not dead and won't be dead for long! And, being worked with Non-source code and source code environments, I feel, a developer with source code will always have an upper hand to reach an optimal solution.

Right on the mark Bhushan.
Cheers
Felipe

japanese customer like to use AFS..