TK no longer available in version 6.0 and above

[Kevin Scantlan]

We are in the process of upgrading CL v. 5.8.5 to CL 6.1.1 when we discovered that some of our home grown tools that use tcl/TK will no longer function due to the fact that TK is no longer available in version 6.  So, we have postponed our upgrade until we can come up with a solution.  I have a few questions:

1.  Did anyone see any notification of pulling the support for TK?  I look through the release notes for 6.1 and did not see anything reference.

2.  It appears that the TK modules are in the 8.5 ( current version with CL v. 6) , but hciwish is not.   hciwish is what give us access to TK in the same way the hcitcl gives us access to tcl.  We tried to copy the hciwish that is with CL v. 5.8.5 and use it, but it kept wanting TCL 8.4 libraries.  Anyone know of a workaround to allow us to use TK?

3.  The justification for no longer supporting TK is that the IDE does not use TK.   But does the IDE use tcl or only java?  Would they quit support of tcl if it did?

Maybe we’re just about the only one who uses TK.    I’ve not seen any references to TK here in Clovertech.

Looking for some feedback, and if there are anyone from the company reading this, let it be known that we are not happy campers.   It looks like it’s going to require a lot of work to re-write our apps.  Any reference that I’ve seen always has tcl and TK together.  My reference books all say  TCL with TK.  Why make TK inaccesable?

Topic

[David Barr]

I’m still on 5.8.4, so I can’t try this, but can you put “package require Tk” in a script and run it with tcl or hcitcl?

[John Valdes]

Kevin,

Just curious, what are you using the TK for?

[Kevin Scantlan]

We have built a number of apps where we use TK.  One example is where we have a number of domains (non-prod) in Cerner where we send/receive messages to our test interface engine (BUILD, CERT, DEV, TRAIN, etc).  We don’t have separate interfaces for each of them and we point the test engine to one of them at a time.  So, this apps allows us to configure the 30 plus interfaces for each domain, and the apps also allows us to switch between domains thread by thread, or a whole domain at a time.  We also have a utility app where we can view the current status like the netmonitor does, but has more features such as rate (messages/sec).  We can also view stats broken down by thread, hour , and message type within hour.  The are all graphic apps.

[David Barr]

I’m on 6.1.2 now, and I was able to test this. If you say “package require Tk” at a tcl or hcitcl prompt then it opens up GUI window. I think you could add that command to your wish scripts and use tcl instead of wish as the interpreter.

[Rob Abbott]

We had to drop support for Tk / wish when we upgraded to Tcl 8.5.  There were several issues with tk and some associated packages the old GUIs used – no more support for BLT/TIX, no support for extended TkX (so no keyed lists).

There may be some remnants of this in 6.1 (e.g. the Tk packages out there) but if you need to use Tk moving forward I would suggest you install it independently of Cloverleaf as Tk is not something we can continue to support. Especially with Tcl 8.6 coming in Cloverleaf 6.2. I believe you can get a good install from ActiveState.

This should be a mention of this in the 6.0 / 6.0.x release notes.  We did provide the  “hcialertnotify” utility to replace the “hciguimsg” functionality that a lot of customers were using.

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Kevin Scantlan]

Where is the documentation for this command?

I looked at the perl script for hcialertnotify and saw that it’s really only executing  hcicmd -t d -c “triggernotify $message $msgfile $source”.

I looked up triggernotify under hcicmd and it says:

triggernotify {ALERTNAME {alertname}} {ALERTMSG {message}} {ALERTSRC {source list}} .

Is the alertname an existing alert in your alert file?

Does the alert message override the action message?

Does the source list override the sources for that alert?

We use hciguimsg to write a message to the desktop with a particular IP address.  Our most useful usage is to create a pop up window (TK) on the screen where we run the netmonitor for operations.  How does hcialertnotify replace hciguimsg for this?  With hciguimsg we have to run Reflections on the desktop of who is supposed to receive the message.

Also, it is our intention to migrate completely to Global Monitor when get to version 6.1.2 for all of our sites.  How can we use hcialertnotify to send a message to our operators?

I searched for hcialertnotify in the Cloverleaf Integration Suite Help Contents and did not find anything.

[Author]

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