Product Features
Omnis Studio product features in more detail...
Integrated Development Environment
Omnis Studio employs a What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) visual design environment. Simply drag-and-drop visual elements onto your design windows to create the appearance you want. Studio runs on all major desktop operating systems, allowing Windows, Mac OS X & Linux single users as well as teams to develop, test, preview and deploy applications seamlessly, to any of these platforms.
Build and edit windows, dialog and information panels in minutes with simple-to-use property editor and component store. Flexible positioning of palette windows, information toolbars and workspace objects, allowing you to preview and edit application objects on-the-fly. Switch to runtime view for previewing finished applications, design view for developing applications or combined view for elements of both.
Create custom toolbars, menus and help systems tailored to meet the exact needs of your application.
Easy-to-use browser interface allows you to see all of your application objects at a glance.
Powerful Version Control System (VCS). Allows teams of developers to coordinate their efforts in producing larger applications.
Visual objects respond to a compehensive set of events including mouse-over, mouse-click, drag and drop. Trap events using 4GL code and build comprehensive state awareness into every active object in your application.
Object Oriented approach which supports inheritance making it easy to overload and customize both visual and non-visual objects to your exact requirements.
Omnis Programming
Omnis has a built-in programming language providing flow of control statements, iterative statements, expression evalualtion, and many commands. For example, commands such as
opening files and displaying dialogs are achieved with a single Omnis command.
Using the versatile Omnis method editor, easy to read and maintain code can be written behind every object in your application.
Omnis 4GL supports all traditional programming constructs such as variables, loops, procedures (methods) & functions as well as conditional programming. In addition to standard data types, Omnis implements single and multi-dimensional arrays using the unique Omnis List type.
Store data and variables inside application objects in non-volatile storage. Lets you write applications that store their state on closure.
Build error and event trapping into your application. Lets you build belt-and-braces applications that are fault tolerant and network hardened.
Omnis notation- the power behind Omnis Studio. Omnis notation complements the Omnis programming language, providing a way of referencing all objects and settings in your application. Comprising of a tree structure, Omnis notation can be used to access every element inside your application, external components as well as platform and environmental settings.
The Omnis Catalog lists and describes all the functions, constants, variables and events available to your application. External (plug-in) components can also register methods and constants. Simply drag them directly into the method editor.
Predictive command entry. Simply start typing a command to have the method editor complete it. The command palette changes to show the predicted command, from where you can click to choose a different permutation or browse the entire language collection to find the command you want. Context tooltips also provide hints where commands require parameters.
Communication with other processes. Omnis supports interprocess communication via Omnis Automation and COM objects under Windows. Automate programs that are compatible with AppleScripts or Apple Events under Mac OS X.
Launch and interact with external applications under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Use your Omnis application to perform parallel processing of routine tasks.
The Omnis language is a real-time interpreted programming language. There is no need to compile and link projects in order to test them- just open the startup task and go.
Windows can even be tested independently from the rest of the application.
Comments help you to write tidy and self-documenting code. Lines of existing code can be commented-out at the press of a key.
Chroma-coding. Method lines are colored according to their context allowing you to distinguish different parts of a command line at a glance.
The built-in debugger allows you to step through your application line by line. You can set soft as well as hard/non-volatile breakpoints in your methods, allowing you to highlight and share issues with other developers.
Run-time debugging. Change lines of code on-the-fly and step over them immediately- no compilation or linking is needed.
Intelligent palette switching allows you keep track of variables and property values as you step through the application. Set watch variables to keep track of important changes.
Stack trace lets you see how the program arrived at the current method line. Move up and down the method stack by simply clicking on a line of the stack view.
The debugger instantly warns about unexpected or missing parameters and other run-time errors, allowing application problems to be ironed out immediately.
The Omnis trace log records not only start-up issues but logs each breakpoint and method line being debugged. You can also write entries to the trace log and can read the log contents from within your application.
Powerful Graphics and Text Capabilities
Omnis visual objects include tree lists, progress bars, working messages, tab panes and side-bars as well as a variety of 2 and 3 dimensional primitives such as lines, circles and boxes. All fully customizable.
Display high resolution images from a range of graphical formats; JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, etc.
Display fully-customizable graphs and tables from your data. Choose from pie charts, bar graphs, XY, polar, gauge and meter types.
View video and other media content using plug-ins such as Microsoft Media Player and Quicktime player.
Multi-monitor support lets you develop and deploy applications for use with two or more display devices.
Manage styles and themes for your displays, allowing you to give all visual aspects of your application a consistent look and feel.
Built-in icon editor- lets you design custom thumbnails and motifs for buttons and other window objects. Cut and paste images to/from external applications. 32-bit alpha-blending/transparency is also supported.
Omnis visual objects include list boxes and grids for displaying statistical, scientific and other tabular data- all fully customizable with support for scrolling, mouse & keyboard events.
Display and print powerful reports that you can design and compile yourself. Extract data from local as well as SQL data sources. Create templates, add page numbers, date time, headers, footers and graphics.
Print reports and other media to the screen, printers, files and a variety of other off-screen devices including HTML, clipboard and RTF (Rich Text Format).
Versatile text formating and control. Choose from built in fonts or create/import your own. Full control over the size, positioning and color of text as well as other attributes such as underlining, italics and bold type.
Search and sort data in lists quickly and easily. Use the powerful Omnis language to add, delete and replace list lines and to quickly handle large volumes of text.
Support for Unicode; UTF-8, UTF-16 and other encodings (Omnis Studio Unicode version only). Read and write Unicode data directly from/to SQL databases. Cut and paste Unicode text into window fields and enter Unicode text directly via compatible input devices.
Cut, paste and copy data from the operating system clipboard directly into Omnis variables and window fields.
Conformance with display standards on each of the major operating systems. Mac dialogs look like they come from inside Apple whilst Win32 objects match the particular Windows version being used, e.g. adopting the Windows Vista look and feel under Windows Vista.
As well as developing applications for the internet using the Omnis Studio Web edition, it is also possible to make use of internet technologies such as HTTP and FTP using the Standard and Enterprise editions of Studio- for which a range of programming commands are provided.
POP3 and SMTP commands allow you to send and receive emails from within your application.
HTTP commands allow HTML and other data to be exchanged with the internet and with other applications. Lets you create "messaging" applications.
FTP commands allow data and files to be transferred between applications and FTP servers quickly and easily.
Transmit and receive data from serial I/O ports. The Omnis Port Profiles utility allows you to configure ports specifically for use by your applications. Allows communication with dumb terminals, serial printers and other serial devices.
Omnis Data Access Modules (DAMs) are provided enabling connections to all major database vendors. Use of DAMs (other than the OmnisSQL DAM) requires the Enterprise or Web edition of Omnis Studio.
Connect to Omnis native datafiles to store and retrieve data locally or via local area network.
Connect to Omnis native datafiles via OmnisSQL DAM (Data Access Module)
Use ODBC and JDBC DAMs for generic data access.
Use Oracle, Sybase, DB2, PostgreSQL, and MySQL DAMs for direct access to leading database servers.
SQL database access. Connect and manage multiple server databases, remote procedures, transactions, manage large objects and session pools (some features are DB specific).
Interactive SQL utility. Provides a SQL console for you to perform queries directly against your database tables.
Drag database tables and views quickly and easily into your application to build a description of the table (schema) or use the SQL Browser utility to create, modify and show the contents of tables.
Drag tables between two open SQL sessions to port data quickly and easily. Table names, indexes and structures are created automatically.
Native access to Frontbase and Openbase databases is also available. (Provided by third-parties).
Finished applications can be locked to hide their content from end-users and to prevent modifications to your code.
Write applications that can be accessed using the Omnis Runtime Client (thick client). (Standard, Enterprise and Web edition). Omnis runtimes are licensed separately.
Write applications that can be accessed from a standard internet browser using the free Web Client plug-in (Thin Web Client) or using standard HTML controls (Ultra-thin Web Client). ( Web edition only).
Run Omnis silently/as a service (on supported platforms). Omnis starts on system start-up and runs invisibly. ( Web edition only).