Xmarc Fire 5.2
Release Notes

Contents

New in this Release

 Product Availability Matrix

Class Fire Tool

Sun4 Solaris 7

i386
Win NT 4.0 
Win 95
Win 2000 		IBM RS/6000 AIX 4.3 HP9000/700
HP-UX 11
Fire Base Fire Engine 

Database Interfaces  

-

-

-

-
  Oracle 8.1 (fxoracle8i, fx8i)

  ODBC 
(fxodbc)

-

- -
Data Translators  

-

-

-

-
  Intergraph  (fxigds)

  ARC/INFO (fxarc)

  ESRI Shape (fxshape)

  VPF (fxvpf)

  AutoCAD (fxacad)

  Mapinfo (fxmif)

Web Deploy Options  

Web Browser Support MS Internet Explorer with Native Java (5+)

-

-

-
  MS Internet Explorer with Sun Java Plug-in

-

-

-
  Netscape with Native Java(4.7+)

  Netscape (6+) with Sun Java Plug-in

-

-

    =  Available in this release.

Platform specific information

Sun4 / Solaris 2.7

Oracle Support

This release contains support  for  Oracle 8i (8.1.x) only. The  Fire/Oracle interface program requires  the Oracle client shared library for Pro*C clients, libclntsh.so, at run time.  This can be achieved by adding $ORACLE_HOME/lib to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. See your Oracle Installation Guide for information about generating this shared library if it does not already exist.
 

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Relational model spatial data -  (fxoracle8i) , the configuration file. fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i_rel fxoracle8i fx

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Object model spatial data -  (fx8i) , the configuration file. fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i fx8i fx

For versions of Oracle previous to 8.1.x, development has been discontinued. For details of legacy availability, contact Xmarc support.

Informix Support

Development has been discontinued for Informix databases. For details of continued legacy availability, contact Xmarc support.

Ingres support

Development has been discontinued for Ingres databases. For details of continued legacy availability, contact Xmarc support.

Win NT 4.0 / Win 95 (i386) / Windows 2000

NTLM

Transparent support for Microsoft's NTLM protocol is included in this release for Web-deployed Fire data services.

SSL

Transparent support for Secure Socket Layer security (https) is included in this release for url communication with SSL web servers.

Oracle Support

This release contains support  for  Oracle 8i (8.1.x) only.

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Relational model spatial data - (fxoracle8i) , the configuration file. fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i_rel fxoracle8i fx

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Object model spatial data - (fx8i) , the configuration file. fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i fx8i fx

For versions of Oracle previous to 8.1.x, development has been discontinued. For details of legacy availability, contact Xmarc support.

Informix Support

Development has been temporarily discontinued for Informix databases. For details of continued legacy availability, contact Xmarc support.

ODBC support

Support for ODBC drivers is included in this release. To use this interface, the configuration file, fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif odbc fxodbc fx

 

IBM RS/6000 / AIX 4.3.3

Oracle support

This release contains support  for  Oracle 8i (8.1.6+).  The  Fire/Oracle interface program requires  the Oracle client shared library for Pro*C clients, libclntsh, at run time.  This can be achieved by adding $ORACLE_HOME/lib to the LIBPATH environment variable. See your Oracle Installation Guide for information about generating this shared library if it does not already exist.

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Relational model spatial data - (fxoracle8i) , the configuration file. fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i_rel fxoracle8i fx

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Object model spatial data - (fx8i) , the configuration file. fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i fx8i fx

 

HP-UX 11.0

Oracle Support

This release includes support for Oracle 8.1.6 on HP-UX  11.0. The  Fire/Oracle interface program requires  the Oracle client shared library for Pro*C clients, libclntsh, at run time.  This can be achieved by adding $ORACLE_HOME/lib to the SHLIB_PATH environment variable. See your Oracle Installation Guide for information about generating this shared library if it does not already exist.

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Relational model spatial data - (fxoracle8i) , the configuration file, fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i_rel fxoracle8i fx

To use the Oracle 8i interface - Object model spatial data - (fx8i) , the configuration file,  fire.ini, should contain a dbif record:

dbif oracle/8i fx8i fx

Informix Support

Development has been discontinued for Informix databases. For details of


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Known Issues and Workarounds

Fire

  1. On the HP 9000/ HP-UX 11 platform, the default xfont (fixed) is not available in the C locale. Fire exits without any messages if it cannot load this font. Workaround - Set the locale to one which supports the font (setenv LANG en_US.iso88591) or specify a supported font when starting Fire (fire -xfont=font_name)
  2. In Fire for AIX 4.3, list panels with a row height of less than 5 are not rendered properly, and appear as a single line. A workaround is to use a row height of 5 or more.
  3. In Fire for AIX 4.3, slider panels sometimes do not execute the panel.drag callbacks. The problem is intermittent.
  4. When receiving EIM (graphic) data via a network service, data sometimes get corrupted. The client is typically on NT and the problem is seen when IE5 or above is installed. A workaround is as follows:
  1. Fire's browser.eval() function allows the Fire plugin to communicate with JavaScript in the browser. To use this function there's a requirement that must be met first. The HTML page that launches the Fire plugin MUST have a small stub of JavaScript code in it. Something like the following within the <head> </head> tags of your HTML page will do the trick:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

    <!-// Activate cloak
    var testvar = 'Fire Rocks!';
    //Deactivate cloak -><

/SCRIPT>

 

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Documentation

NOTE: The latest documentation resides on the CD in the documentation directory.

This includes:

All the above are in a new HTML format, and will also be available soon on-line from xmarc.com as they get extended.

Your comments on the new format are welcome.

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Web Browser Support

Supported  browsers for the Fire Plug-in are:

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End of Life Statements

ISS 4.5 was the highest numbered release which included support for any mx protocol services. Consequently no mx protocol services are included with this release.

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