Update on EMS, SPIC and that elusive Splitter Bar that does not exist…
Well I got the splitter bar working, very nicely as well, I’ll post a better write up about it at some point as at the moment I’m back at work and looking at some very ugly decorations (why do companies insist on putting decorations up in a multi-cultural office???). EMS and SPIC have been going though some interesting changes over the last couple of days, one major change is in the debug level code, I’ve simplified the process and now I’ve only got 5 main levels (Normal, Flow, Warning, Error, Information), 3 developer levels ( Developer output, Memory Allocations, XML Dev out), and 2 options to enable module and API logging – reducing the EMS log files a little in the process.
One major problem has been hit by a user of the system when it comes to the ECM integration, apparently it’s not working correctly, so I’ve had to create a special version of EMS just for him, and I’m hoping that the changes will help identify the issue that he is having. I’ve left the changes in for the next couple of versions of EMS, mainly as the changes are for logging the data flow of the system, and basically they are logging information that I never thought I needed to monitor, a lesson learnt there – have a flow log call at the start of every function except the logging one of course 
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SPIC is coming along nicely, I’ve spent the last week working on the splitter bar for this project and as I said it’s working almost the way I want it to, I’ve got a few additional items I want to change on it, but they can wait until SPIC is out the door. One thing that I have noted is with spitter bars, or this could just be down to the way I have made mine to work, is that you need 4 windows to handle them, a parent window that contains the splitter bar and two other windows, these other windows could be a splitter parent or even the view windows for a document / view style window layout. Even at this early stage of development I’ve been thinking about how the scheduling window at the bottom of the SPIC screen will look, and how it will give the user an idea of what skills they will be training over the next few hours / days / weeks / months, and I will be writing up a full thought process blog entry closer to the time that I do this.
Anyway back to the coding.