October 3, 2007

RELLANG.SQC

Related language tables are a PeopleSoft-standard way of managing multiple translations of a description field, depending on the user's preferred language. This is important to anyone who supports a PeopleSoft installation in multiple languages, but unfortunately it also has an effect on anyone else who uses the debugger.

I've had occasional reports of programs that never seem to "start" in the debugger—it just seems to be in the "loading" step forever. In general that may happen to a first-time user who has not set up the various file paths correctly, preventing SQRW from starting. But we recently had two different cases of this. It took several minutes for the program to load and then a minute to step from one statement to the next (which normally should take less than a second). The cause was a particular PeopleSoft-delivered file, RELLANG.SQC.

RELLANG.SQC is a generated file. It contains a section for each table that has a related language table. By including a particular #DEFINE in your SQR program, you get access to a short section of code that will return a row's description in a specified language.

At HRMS/HCM release 8.3, RELLANG.SQC was about 83,000 lines long. At 8.9 it has ballooned to 253,000 lines! It consists of almost 100% comments and inactive code—code that has been blocked out by #IFDEFs. If you are not using multiple languages, it's equivalent to a quarter of a million lines of comments. However, the debugger still needs to load and display this file. It uses a rich text box for this. It takes time to read, parse and syntax-highlight the file. Then later, during stepping, the text box must be refreshed several times and it strains under the load of this huge number of lines.

It is unlikely that you would ever want to see the inactive code in this file. It's also a special case, being 12 times the size of the next largest file. The debugger will soon provide an option to suppress listing of inactive code in huge SQCs. This will be released late this week and I highly recommend that you download it. If you're a current customer, you will see the new version mentioned at the bottom of the configuration panel as soon as it's released. It may still take 20 seconds or so to load this SQC if it's included in your program (it's nearly 7 megabytes and just pulling it across the network can take a few seconds), but stepping time will be greatly reduced. The new version also includes a few other features, including an automatic display of #SQL-COUNT after a BEGIN-SQL section executes.

Until next time...