Express Data Manager 4.0 Now Shipping!

"EPM Technology has the vision to deliver a universal solution for the exchange, sharing and archiving of product data, including facilities to use, integrate and develop necessary software systems transparently in the product life cycle". This vision is exploited through computer-sensible object models and EPM has selected the ISO 10303 (STEP) methodology as the basis for its implementation of an information data warehouse and pertinent functionality. The availability of +50 industrially accepted product data models using the EXPRESS language is a bonus and org-anizations can use them as is or as resources when defining their own business data.

EXPRESS provides a lot of benefits. Perhaps the most important is its human-readability combined with available implementation forms that enable the consistency between information requirements and the implementation, in addition to very powerful constraints modelling capabilities. EPM has verified that this powerful language through extensive use of derived attributes, functions and procedures can save redundant code development and maintenance by various applications sharing the same information base. Besides cost, the quality and security aspect should also be considered as improved when the responsibility for the correct processing is centralized.

EDMexpressVM

EXPRESS Data Manager 4.0 offers the first EXPRESS virtual machine - a module that processes all EXPRESS expressions as used in derived attributes, constraints, map specifications etc. As can been seen from the picture the EDMexpressVM is frequently used by the many late bound (schema-independent) modules in EXPRESS Data Manager.

One new module utilizing the EDMexpressVM is the EDMexpressDebugger which can be invoked by the EDMobjectBrowser, EDMmodelConverter and EDMmodelChecker, e.g. whenever an expression is calculated. Like normal debugger break points can be defined for stepping through the call stack and list actual values in scope of the expression. Everyone that have experienced the cryptic FALSE message from a global rule processing n levels of QUERY statement will automatically learn to love this module.

Customers like BAE SYSTEMS and DaimlerChrysler have used EXPRESS Data Manager for developing automated data exchange processors to their PDM and legacy systems, whereas all development is captured in EXPRESS and EXPRESS schemas and the application is built using out-of-the-box functionality in EXPRESS Data Manager. Coming back to the human-readability of EXPRESS, the documentation of in-house databases as well as the conversion to an international standard is documented and every changes to the "documentation" is reflected in the implementation.

EDMvisualExpress

The data modeling and layout module EDMvisual-Express has been improved to meet the many challenging standardization efforts using EXPRESS beyond STEP. Especially the WEB and RTF export filters, enable a new dimension of concurrent, distributed development of EXPRESS schemas. It is highly recommended to use this application when developing or review- ing short and long form EXPRESS schemas. EDMvisualExpress is an integrated part of EXPRESS Data Manager and can both be used to define and view schemas in the repositories (metadata).

EDMvisualDataBuilder

In the effort of supporting schema-driven application development, EPM has developed the EDMvisual-DataBuilder - a tool that generates automatically a configurable graphical user interface. This tool is very useful for prototyping of data to verify the underlying schema and for the forms-like applications. Methods can be applied to EXPRESS objects to present data using OLE objects, other applications, etc.