Insis is a Uruguayan company that, through its main tool –CGI-, provides solutions to over 150 clients that work in varied sectors, such as Manufacturing, Retail, Services, Finance, Forestry, Agriculture, Health, Hotels, and Government.
GCI is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution that integrates in a single system a company’s complete administrative processes, from the preparation of quotations and client order reception to product delivery and collection, and including the Sales, Production, Storage, Distribution, Accounting and Finance processes.
However, Insis needed to migrate its main solution, with over 2,000 objects, from win to web in a very limited time. For this purpose they used the services of PuntoExe, a GeneXus Solution Partner.
One of the initial objectives that were presented by PuntoExe was to make an exhaustive analysis of the objects. From the start and as part of the project’s development there was a need for using the facilities that GeneXus Patters offers for this purpose, by preparing new specialized Patterns to reduce development times.
For the development of the migration projects, Insis had to hand in its KB, an extremely delicate issue since it demands extreme trust between the supplier and the client. For this purpose, a Consolidated KB and an individual one per programmer were used, using SVT AdminG. as KB administration tool. In turn, each object of the programmer KBs was converted into a private object, so that a programmer’s KB would only have access to the programs it was going to migrate. Finally, the freeware tool eGroupWare was used to keep the client informed about the progress of the migration.
The project, however, presented some challenges. To achieve a successful migration, some patterns had to be developed during the migration process. Marcelo Bustamante, PuntoExe’s Project Manager, stated that “our objective was to be able to meet this challenge using Patterns because we knew that if we achieved it we would obtain a very important set of tools to solve GeneXus systems migration from Win to Web very quickly.”
As a result of this work PXTools have been created, a tool developed by PuntoExe that has mainly 2 patterns and a series of APIs that help in the migration process. One of the patterns created was a powered WorkWith that considers any functionality that is developed in CGI’s Work Panels, ensuring this way that no programmer has to modify GeneXus code lines manually to obtain the required behavior from a migrating object. The other pattern was the Parameter Request, whose main feature is generating a Web panel that requests the necessary data for the execution of a procedure or report.
“Productivity certainly suffered a dramatic change when using Patterns and the use of GeneXus 9.0 helped us to migrate with minimum impact thanks to the support of Ajax for rules of the ´Client side validation´ type” said Bustamante.