V10 Test Problems

Scriptcase 10
#1

Downloaded V10 for testing purposes. I thought by now that the worst of the bugs would be sorted… silly me.

Even something as simple as creating a blank project for testing purposes just fails. The Create button does nothing If I click cancel the annoying ‘Loading’ rotating gif appears and never goes away.

Hardly a good advert for the product (See fix below).

Installation
The first big time waster was the install. Everything looked fine, but when you ran the IDE, it just hung up. 2 hours later (after reinstalls, manually updating the version, yada, yada, I eventually fixed it by clearing all browser casche. Something in the install (on a different machine than the v9) corrupts the cache. I eventually ran it in incognito mode and it worked. When I cleared cache in the browser it worked fine.

Using the AI Capability
Go figure… you need to enter a licence key to access the AI setup, which of course you cant do with a trial version. SO the main capability of V10 cannot be tested. I sent a message to Netmake to ask how I do it… they let me have a temporary key.

Once in the AI module you neeed to setup a link to your preferred AI… Which makes sense if you think aout it.
Scriptcase does not host the LLM (Large Language Model) or pay for your computation. By forcing you to use your own external API key (from OpenAI, Gemini, or Claude), they pass the variable infrastructure and token costs entirely to you. This prevents Scriptcase from having to charge heavy, recurring monthly AI subscription fees on top of their software license.

I don’t necessarily think this is a problem as I’m not convinced you will need heavy AI token usage in normal dev work, but only time will tell.
I signed up for a free key using gemini, but just do a coppilot search or go onto your google account and it will give you options. Not sure if I did it right, but I had to setup a £20 credit on the google account and I set a £5per month spending cap to allow me to test.

Loading a Project
I exported and loaded a v9 - (350+ app) project fairly straightforwardly and it seemed to work. I haven’t fully tested it yet as I want to work through it in a structured way. Here are my first comments.

Dashboards
Kept coming up with a header warning error on a (previously working) Dashboard. (My home screen so easy to spot!) The error indicated that some output was being sent to the header after it was locked. I disabled all header stuff in settings and it still persisted. The only way I found to fix it was to delete all widgets and add them back. (What an absolute waste of effort).

Thats It for now, I’ll add any other snippets as I delve deeper into the software.

#2

Dashboard error reported here:

With some indifferent support from Scriptcase AI to find it. It was only marginally better than doing it separately using copilot. It made the similar instructions to do things you cant actually do in scriptcase and wanted me to debug a standard dashboard created in v10 that exhibited the same problem!

I’ve temporarily suppressed the warnings causing the problem using the follwing ‘bandaid’ code: in the NEW onApplicationInit event on a dashboard.
error_reporting(0);
ini_set(‘display_errors’, 0);

#3

More Builds

Generating Data Dictionary
Dont know if it worked or not. Got an unhelpful error message saying ‘An error occurred… It may hve not been saved’. Since I was doing the whole database, it just left me feeling it doesn’t work properly. Something as important as this cant be left to chance. I can only suggest you do it a piece at a time.

New Gantt Chart Capability
Overall pretty nice. There are a few niggles, like you cant set a time period to start with plus other time options. If you tick all the timeline period options, the grid uses all of them. If you don’t tick them then the grid is OK, but you cant select them. Also, you cant set the height of the bars so you get some UGLY results depending on the height of the window and the number of tasks in the Gantt. It would be much more sensible to allow a min/max setting for the bar heights. One really REALLY iritating problem though is that for some reason, when the task is wide enough to need a scrollbar, the bar is at the bottom and you need to scroll right down to get to it. Even woese is that for some reason, the task line doesnt always show the full left hand characters even if you haven’t scrolled it, so the text just looks missing or wrong. The scrollbar should be more accessible (top?) and more importantly the field should always start showing the left hand characters.

The final nail in this functionality is that you can’t print the Gantt. Ctrl P is your only option and that is just plain prehistoric. (Read unprofessional)

Performance in the IDE
Generally it seemed faster and fewer (if any) glitches in the refreshes. As part of the migration I also took the opportunity to only bring forward recent versions and so clean the scriptcase db, so that might have helped.

#4

Notifications
Generated the notificaitons module and it seemed to setup the database properly, but I suddenly started getting an alert saying I had a duplicate table.(completely unrelated… just the first in the table list). This seemed to be a function of an incomplete or other glitch in the notification module setup.
I fixed this by deleting and regenerating the notifications module. You can see where the error is if you go into the menu item (bell) It has stored an incorrect table.

This generation is unfortunately a bit febrile. In my experience, it failed unless you got the settings just right. (e.g. if you didnt select delete tables if they already existed it gave a message and failed back to the selection screen). The selection screen itself seemed to default the user table to the first one in your Database that had the word ‘user’ in it. In my case this was a completely unrelated table.

Also, if the core menu was open (I think), none of the notifications apps were added to the menu. Which means you would have to add 11 lines manually.

Also Unfortunately when testing the module, it just hung the IDE (Or at least slowed it considerably) I did however get the expected notification on my email.
May be my finger trouble, OR a glitch.

Whatever the problem, it is so slow as to be unusable.

For the record, the design assumes that the notifications are sent to ANYONE using the application. In my case this is just not sustainable as Users are segmented by other parameters (e.g. Project) so you need to update all of the SQLs and field selects to accommodate this. Its not always easy to work out the details as some of it is hidden in the various methods. I did begin fixing it, but then see below…

Further testing showed more errors. Send using the profile option just failed silently without sending mails. According to Scriptcase AI its because the profile send uses a different smtp API than normal. Given I set the module up to use the same API as the project 2FA and other mails, this is appalling. Here is the bug report link Notifications failure for send to a profile

Given how long this module has been around, I just found the whole thing POOR and a complete wate of time 0/10.

#5

Deployment
Where do I start? Deployment should be easy, but it hangs part way through. Its about time Netmake added better logging and error reporting to this as a bare minimum.

Its these kind of nonsense problems that have made us use other tools for our latest developments.

#6

Misc Issues

Corrupting Global Variables
I think this may be a residue of problems in v9. I get an occasional problem on some grid to form links. If the form requires a global variable (Which already exists and therefore does NOT need to be passed) and you pass the ‘no value’ option… the grid seems to just take a random variable and post it into the link. this has the effect of making the variable wrong and screws up every app afterwards that need this variable.

For me this is one variable that is set on login and I NEVER want the rest of the apps to update.

Clearly you can fix it by passing the variable ‘again’ in the link, but that is not really the point. Whatever SC does in the links, it should never pass a random variable and screw up globals!

Printing
When setting up a grid to print HTML, the modal that allows report selection (Colour/B&W, Full report/Current Page) comes up with a grayed out background to prevent you from selecting outside the modal. This in itself is fine. However, It collapses the original frame containing the grid such that when you return from print, the grid is now artificially truncated with scroll-bars, instead of the normal screen. The only way you can get the screen back is to refresh the whole browser (not the iframe). Effectively this makes the print selection unusable. Error Report is here: Print to HTML modal causes Grid iFrame to collapse

There are other printing problems in nested grids, where the whole report doesn’t print… just the top record, not the nests.

Conclusion for now

I’ve kept this as a single thread to provide a running summary of my testing.The errors above means for me it is impossible to upgrade. Breaking this kind of working functionality would create massive problems. Its exascerbated by the fact that the licencing model does not let you keep your old (v9) licences live at the same time and roll-back to the working versions becomes a Netmake self-inflicted nightmare.