Frequently Asked Questions
Availability
- What is the availability for the Toolsay Machine Monitoring Toolkit?
- The Toolkit is currently in development. So while you can’t put it into production today, we are continuing to gather feedback about how to shape the product to best serve our customers’ needs.
Code generation
- Why are device property definitions embedded into the client applications, rather than obtained from the server or device?
- Most of the properties are indeed handled generically such that the client could pull their metadata from another source. This would allow old clients to support new devices. In practice, however, this utility would be limited. There typically are some properties that you will want to handle specially with custom code, to give your customers a richer experience. This custom code necessitates deploying a new version of the client anyway. Fortunately, updating clients is fairly painless. The other side of the tradeoff is that by hard-coding the properties, the code you write has design-time programmatic access to property values, with full IntelliSense and designer support.
- Should the device definition code generator be part of a software build process?
- It’s not recommended. Better is to run the generator by hand (typically through a convenient tool shortcut in your IDE) when you update the spreadsheet. Consider the generated code as “source” that you check into source control (as opposed to intermediate files that are not checked in). The generated code takes well to being diffed, so it’s convenient to have it as part of your source code history.