t24DocGen for Temenos Transact

Documentation is outdated, do I really need it?

Recently we were focused on some Temenos Transact/T24 documentation aspects. Generally we (=T24 developers) hate to document things we create. Often we are asked to put technical details to documentation and that information may get outdated at the time of writing ;-) We think it is major reason, that we do not like to write (technical) documentation. We simply feel it is waste of our time.

Do not misunderstand us though. We know how important is up-to-date documentation! We know documentation must be maintained, but we refuse to do it silly way. We claim, that technical documentation must be auto-generated and supplemented by solution/business documentation. You can not explain why ENQUIRY ABC was added to the system. You may try to guess knowing where it is used/referenced, but still the only answer lies in your solution documentation. We want to encourage your devs/vendors to provide reasonable documentation and link it with auto-generated, deep technical information.

What if you could implement your working Temenos solution (prepare and install package (changeset) to some environment) and auto-refresh HTML documentation site from updated Transact/T24 environment? What if you could merge generic site automatically with your specific solution documentation? So instead of getting purely technical documentation you would get complete documentation of your developments.

t24DocGen

We have prepared v1 pure Java, Temenos Transact / Temenos T24, introspection tool that will help you keep your T24 project and solutions documented. Actually our Java8 commandline tool (SpringBoot command line app) is just an important part of our toolset chain that will help you auto-generate static Temenos Transact / Temenos T24 documentation site.

At the moment our focus stays on code and its characteristics, but we are slowly shifting to our goal - complete, searchable and easy navigable T24 documentation site.

t24DocGen v1 auto-documents T24 routines/programs/components and API records (no .tut unit tests yet) of your choice. Thanks to static code analysis functionality we are able to tell many things such as:

• what is routine signature (accepted parameters)
• which routines call which routines (CALL/CALL@/component calls - we auto-generate flattened view as well: which routines are called by which ones)
• which components and in which way are referenced
• which local/global/temporary variables are used and which $INSERT files/components were referenced
• what kind of values are assigned to variables (assignment statements)
• what StringLiterals/IntegerLiterals were seen
• when routine was last compiled
• to which product routine belongs to

There are more options for t24DocGen enhancements in future, be we feel above is quite enough to document codedata relationships and show code dependencies.

t24DocGen - towards complete solution (near future)

In the upcoming time we will extend our toolchain to include more T24 related information and relationships/dependencies:

• menu/context menu items
• (main/tab)versions
• enquiries
• screens/composite screens
• reports
• T24 applications (with reference to datafiles and fields/table structure)
• T24 “virtual” tables
• PW (Process Workflow) steps

As you likely know all these T24 objects are somehow related to each other (table keeps fields which are for example referenced in reports). We strive to document these relationships so you can easily follow (links and backlinks in HTML!), discover and understand various implications. We plan to enable some graphViz visualizations in future, so stay tuned!

Our intentions are to create nice, navigable, searchable site, where you can discover and realize many aspects about your current Temenos T24 / Temenos Transact system.

Run t24DocGen on a daily basis and get most!

We suggest to use our service on daily basis in order to:

• take daily “documentation snapshots” of your DEV/QA/PROD system
• track “daily changes” or “monthly changes” in your environment
• check “data inconsistencies” in your database (eg. enquiry referenced in menu, but not present in ENQUIRY file anymore (eg. mistakenly reversed))

t24DocGen - power is yours!

Our tool consists of several chained tools. JSON and Markdown files are being created in intermediary steps. You get these files back and you can do whatever you need with them.

Interested?

Interested in the product? Do not see benefits yet? Read more or simply contact us!