Category: White Papers

The Original Internet Language

Masking

The Purpose of Masking Patterns Masking patterns are used to format data values in a manner appropriate to the type of information they represent. For example, in Zim, dates are stored as a special type of numerical value, in which the first four digits represent the year, the next two represent the month and the last two stand for…
Read more

Deploying a Zim Application

Deploying a Zim application running in Zim 9 means making the application available for general use by one or more users. In other words, it means “transporting” a Zim application system that is in the development environment to the production environment. A deployed application is different from an application under development because users don’t create…
Read more

Registry on Windows

On Windows, Zim stores basic information in the Registry, like environment variables, options, etc. The ZIM and SQLCPI environment variables The ZIM and SQLCPI environment variables are located in the registry at /HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Zim Corporation/Zim//Zim where version number is the version of Zim that you are currently running. The ZIM environment variable tells where the Zim…
Read more

Capturing and Replaying Form Input

Purpose This feature has been designed to allow Zim application developers to capture form input and later replay the captured keystrokes to simulate typing at the keyboard. The ability to replay form input can aid in testing and debugging applications, and also in producing product demonstrations. FORM SET SAVE and FORM SET INPUT There are…
Read more

Security and Data Protection

Permissions A permission mask is assigned to all application directories, to all EntitySets and relationships, and to all fields in EntitySets and relationships. The permission mask indicates the type of access that particular user IDs are to have to the object. The possible permissions for EntitySets and for relationships are READ, ADD, CHANGE, and DELETE.…
Read more

Implementation

An ASN is simply defined by letting the Reqd attribute of a field to be “Seq” and having the corresponding Entity-Set or Relationships with fields created (or recreated). To ensure proper handling of the existing data, it’s strongly recommended to use DC to perform this operation. The next step is to set the initial value…
Read more

About Automatic Sequence Numbers

The Automatic Sequence Numbers (ASN) is a ZIM feature that allows a field from Entity-Sets or Relationships with fields objects to get its value automatically incremented by one every time a record is added to this object. Usually, such sequential fields are used in these objects to supply a primary key, wherever one is missing.…
Read more

Operation

Once defined, adding records to objects containing ASN will increment the corresponding field by one, starting from the initialized value. In fact, the first record added in this way will have the initialized value, the second this value plus one, and so on. An ASN field is always required. By default, all ASN are enabled.…
Read more

en_CAEnglish