EXCLUSIVES

Upgrading to Lasso 6

By Diane Cassady of Vivaladata

I have been programming Lasso websites with Filemaker and WebStar on the regular MacOS ever since Lasso was released. I've loved OSX ever since I first booted up with it, but the idea of serving on it after so many years of regular OS reliability and simplicity was daunting.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to upgrade to Lasso 6 and serve databases on OSX. Lasso effortlessly installs itself into the built in Apache web server on OSX that is modestly referred to as Personal Web Sharing. Personal Web Sharing can be turned off and on under Services in the Sharing portion of the System Preferences. Make sure it's off when you install Lasso. You will also need to type in your administrative username and password for OSX to install the Lasso software. Once you have installed Lasso, turn Personal Web Sharing back on. The files that will be served by Personal Web Sharing are located in WebServer within the library folder.

Once installed, an administrative interface for Lasso is available through your web browser. Locally, you can access the web administrative interface at http://127.0.0.1/Lasso/. I never looked forward to winding my way through the maze of options in the web interface for Lasso 3.6. The updated web interface is much more self-explanatory. Options are clearly laid out in a well-organized tabbed interface. Under Data Sources you'll find connectors for Filemaker, MySQL, and Lasso MySQL, Lasso's built in MySQL database.

Filemaker works a bit differently with Lasso on OSX than with the regular OS. The web companion must be enabled for each of the databases you wish to publish using Lasso. You must change the port that the web companion shares to keep it from conflicting with Personal Web Sharing. The web companion port can be set under the web companion plug-in preferences of the Filemaker application preferences. I have mine set to 591. Once you have web companion enabled for your open Filemaker database, it will be listed as "Enabled" under the "Databases" tab of the Lasso administrative web interface. Suffixes are not visible in the administrative interface.

Likewise, suffixes will need to be eliminated from any existing Lasso code. Before Lasso can fully read a password protected Filemaker file, you must enter the password in the database detail portion of the Lasso settings. Once Lasso can fully read the file, you can individually enable layouts and fields as well as specify actions that can be performed on individual fields.

Groups and users can also be specified through the Lasso administration. I found it easier to choose the user through the group to get access to permissions rather than trying to access user permissions directly through the user tab. If you have a lot of settings entered in your existing Lasso settings for 3.6, you'll find it easy to import these options using the option available under the Upgrade tab. This option is only available after running the Lasso 3 exporter. If you plan to allow your users to create files through Lasso, you'll need to allow Lasso permission to create those files in OSX. Details can be found in the File Permissions section of chapter 3 in Mac OS X Tips provided in the Lasso documentation.

The build tab includes an interface to build SQL databases. This is an especially important feature which makes it possible for users to build and serve SQL database solutions without knowing SQL. Once you've built your databases, the browse tab of Lasso's "admin" interface provides a window to all of the data contained in your databases. Import and export options are provided for easy data manipulation.

Besides building databases, the LassoApp file enables you to combine all of your editable text files that make up your solution into a single, locked, cross-platform LassoApp file. This not only protects your source code, but also allows for easy distribution. Before saving your solution as a LassoApp file you'll want to convert the internal links to [LassoApp_Link] tags. Any links left unchanged will function normally as links referencing items outside of the LassoApp file.

The starting page of your solution is entered when you create it. Once your solution is created, it can be served off your site like any other document with a link to the LassoApp acting as a link to the starting page of the solution. If you would like to link to other pages within the solution, you can do that with a Response LassoApp search argument in the URL to your LassoApp file. Solutions saved as LassoApps will run faster and take up less space than your original conglomeration of HTML, Lasso, and graphic files. To run a LassoApp solution, you must have your LassoApp settings enabled through the Lasso "admin" interface. This option is enabled by default.

Although many of Lasso's tags - such as those used for inline statements, displaying records, fields, variables, math and string functions - have remained unchanged, there are some differences between LDML syntax for version 6 versus 3.6. "Classic" Lasso that uses tags in forms and links to perform actions is supported when Classic Lasso Syntax is set to "Enabled" under the Settings tab. Actions and substitution values such as "Layout" should begin with a dash and strings should be enclosed in single quotes. Lasso can still work with syntax that does not adhere to these standards when the Strict Lasso 6 syntax option is set to disabled. By default, these two options are set to "Enabled" and "Disabled" respectively, however, performance will improve when strict Lasso 6 syntax standards are met. Syntax changes are detailed in the Upgrading section of the Lasso 6 Language Guide.

Besides the empowering administrative user interface and easy installation on OSX with its built in Apache web server, Lasso's other impressive new features make this application an attainable, worthwhile upgrade.