How to load ALL context files?

Hi Tom,

Apologies for the delay in responding to this - I'm currently in the middle of 3 weeks of travel.

tweeks said:

Of course it's not really that difficult to roll a procedure to recursively delete a directory, but I constantly find myself looking for low-level procedures that are not provided in the documented APIs. Sometimes I can find the functionality I want (or at least something closer to it) in the un-documented API....

Just because they are in the release does not mean that they are QA'd to be used for external customers. They may be QA'd as part of our software, but there may be limitations within the context of how they are being used, which you might find show up in your application. For example, there are numerous APIs in the ADE code which require two different calls to complete a task - using just one of them gives the appearance of working but leaves the data in a half-done state such that some things will break. 

Secondly, we have complete freedom to remove such functions, change their behaviour, or alter the interface so that callers have to change their code. So whilst it might seem you are saving yourself time, in fact you are building a potential time bomb. I've seen too many cases where a well-meaning individual has used a private API and then either forget about it or (worse) leave the company and leave it to somebody else (quite possibly including us as AEs) to pick up the pieces when it breaks some time later. We've had customers screaming at us because of private APIs that got removed between two releases and insisting that we add them back (despite the tool for which they were really intended having been end of lifed).

tweeks said:

This sounds like a job for getDepends(). Using it, do you think I could reconstruct the context dependency graph, and then load all the (64-bit) contexts in the right sequence?

Maybe, although getDepends() is private too. However, more importantly, I don't see why you need to load the contexts to be able to look for functions. isCallable() tells you whether a function is callable without it having to actually be loaded. Not that I'm condoning hunting for private functions, as I explained earlier!

Kind Regards,

Andrew.

Hi Tom,

Apologies for the delay in responding to this - I'm currently in the middle of 3 weeks of travel.

tweeks said:

Of course it's not really that difficult to roll a procedure to recursively delete a directory, but I constantly find myself looking for low-level procedures that are not provided in the documented APIs. Sometimes I can find the functionality I want (or at least something closer to it) in the un-documented API....

Just because they are in the release does not mean that they are QA'd to be used for external customers. They may be QA'd as part of our software, but there may be limitations within the context of how they are being used, which you might find show up in your application. For example, there are numerous APIs in the ADE code which require two different calls to complete a task - using just one of them gives the appearance of working but leaves the data in a half-done state such that some things will break. 

Secondly, we have complete freedom to remove such functions, change their behaviour, or alter the interface so that callers have to change their code. So whilst it might seem you are saving yourself time, in fact you are building a potential time bomb. I've seen too many cases where a well-meaning individual has used a private API and then either forget about it or (worse) leave the company and leave it to somebody else (quite possibly including us as AEs) to pick up the pieces when it breaks some time later. We've had customers screaming at us because of private APIs that got removed between two releases and insisting that we add them back (despite the tool for which they were really intended having been end of lifed).

tweeks said:

This sounds like a job for getDepends(). Using it, do you think I could reconstruct the context dependency graph, and then load all the (64-bit) contexts in the right sequence?

Maybe, although getDepends() is private too. However, more importantly, I don't see why you need to load the contexts to be able to look for functions. isCallable() tells you whether a function is callable without it having to actually be loaded. Not that I'm condoning hunting for private functions, as I explained earlier!

Kind Regards,

Andrew.