CIs: Connecting to PeopleSoft Jolt sever from VB.net. Why & How. Part 4

[If you are looking to Load 100k+ rows into PeopleSoft quickly, this isn't the post for you! This is a multi post piece on Component Interfaces. Hopefully it is informative reading...]

Part 4

A nice thing about interactive mode is that is just that. If you set a field and that updates antoher, you can directly call that other field and the value is there. That is if InteractiveMode is turned on, of course.

Each level and scroll of the component buffer is setup as a collection that can be referenced directly or looped through as in the sample code. For each sub level0 collection there are methods for inserting and deleting items. To use 'Ci_collection.insertitem(x)' x equals Ci_collection.count.

In the sample Code you can see each level is in a For loop. This is good if you are reading out all the rows in the buffer, but for writing you want to jump to either insertingnewitem(collection.count) or oLvlTwo = oLvlTwoCollection.Item(5) unless you do need to cycle through them to find what you want to update etc. You don't need the 'set' statements in .Net. oLvlTwo = oLvlTwoCollection.Item(5) pulls item 5 from the collection and gives it to an object that allow access to that level's fields.

Another Key to CIs, especially in .Net is once you have saved or determined programatically that you don't need the CI anymore, cancel it. Use the .Cancel() function on the CI object. Each time you save, even if you are going to use the as CI again for a new transaction, cancel it and Get/Create it again. You can still read from it or change it in it current state, but once you want to move on to a new rowset etc, Cancel first.

One benifit of using CIs is that the user has to provide credentials, and have access in order to be able to use the CI. This means you are relying on out of the box functionality, which is always nice.

To bring this to a close, there is obviously a lot missing from these short posts, but the point was to point out that although Component Interfaces seem old technology and come with a bunch of over head, they can still be VERY useful when you need a custom solution to a problem and want to leverage the application tier.