Basic concepts for working with BS2IDE

With the previous steps completed, it is now possible to connect to a BS2000 host. The next steps depend on how you want to use BS2IDE. There are several use cases. We now present three basic concepts for working with BS2IDE:
  1. Editing
  2. Editing and Compiling
  3. Editing, Compiling and Debugging

Editing

If the only use case is the access to BS2000 files such as reading, editing, saving, creating, copying and deleting files it sufficient to use the BS2000 Explorer view which shows the BS2000 connections defined by the user (see Remote BS2000 Explorer). Maybe it is useful to define BS2000 file filter to get a subset of files from the specified connection.

Editing and compiling

If you want to create and modify source files, copy books and include files and if you want to compile them and evaluate the listing files it is sufficient as well to work with the Remote BS2000 Explorer. For compilation there are several options to configure the compile actions. They are described in the Remote Compilation chapter. If you have a set of sources and includes as parts of an application which should be compiled as an unit, you should work with projects (see below).

Editing, compiling and debugging

For using BS2IDE for the whole development cycle it is required to use Projects. With projects you have the possibility to systematically arrange your resources and assign the suitable compile rules. You can define prebuild and postbuild commands that also might be procedure calls to build the whole project. After this it is possible to start the builded project, to set breakpoints, and use a huge scope of debugging functions via the BS2IDE user interface ( see Running and Debugging).