🚀 Understanding Uniface 10.4 Services: A Developer's Guide

⚠️ Note: This blog post was created with AI assistance to make Uniface documentation more accessible.

🎯 What Are Uniface Services?

Uniface Services are powerful components that handle the core processing logic in your Uniface applications. Think of them as the "workers" behind the scenes that manage your business operations without showing anything on the screen.

A service typically groups together related entities that work with a specific business object. For example, an order processing service might handle both customer data and order information in one place.

💡 Key Characteristics

Services have some unique features that make them perfect for backend processing:

• Flexible Deployment 🌐 - Run them locally on the client or remotely on a server
• No User Interface 👻 - They work silently in the background
• Full Database Support 💾 - Complete access to database I/O operations
• Multi-tier Ready 🏗️ - Perfect for distributed application architectures
• Named Operations 📝 - Each service can contain multiple callable operations

🔧 Practical Example

Imagine you're building an e-commerce application. You might create a service called "OrderUpdateService" that:

• Validates customer information
• Updates order details in the database
• Calculates shipping costs
• Generates order confirmation data

Your frontend form component would call this service, and the service handles all the backend logic. This separation makes your code cleaner and easier to maintain.

📊 How Services Fit in Your Architecture

One of the coolest things about services is that you can place them anywhere in your system. For example, if you have database-intensive operations, you can run the service directly on the database server. This reduces network traffic and improves performance.

Services are compiled into runtime files with the .svc extension, making them lightweight and easy to deploy.

⚠️ Important Limitations

Since services work without user interaction, certain ProcScript statements are not allowed. You cannot use commands that:

• Display data to users (display, print)
• Wait for user input (edit)
• Show messages (askmess)
• Launch external programs (run)
• Exit the application (apexit)
• Display help (help)

This makes sense because services are meant to be "headless" - they process data and return results without any visual interface.

🎓 When to Use Services

Use services when you need to:

• Perform complex database operations
• Execute business logic that doesn't require user interaction
• Create reusable processing units that can be called from multiple places
• Build multi-tier applications where processing happens on different servers
• Separate presentation logic from business logic

🔍 Advanced Options

Uniface also offers specialized service types:

• Session Services - Handle session-specific data operations
• Entity Services - Manage direct data access for specific entities

These give you even more flexibility when designing your application architecture.

✅ Best Practices

To get the most out of Uniface Services:

1. Keep them focused - Each service should handle a specific business function
2. Name operations clearly - Use descriptive names that explain what each operation does
3. Think about placement - Put services close to the resources they use most
4. Test thoroughly - Since services have no UI, good testing is essential
5. Document well - Other developers need to understand what your service does without seeing it run

🎉 Conclusion

Uniface Services are the backbone of efficient, scalable Uniface applications. They let you separate your business logic from presentation, distribute processing across your system, and build maintainable applications. While they have some limitations compared to UI components, these restrictions actually help you write cleaner, more focused code.

Whether you're building a simple application or a complex multi-tier system, understanding services is key to getting the most out of Uniface 10.4.

Happy coding! 🚀