Enhancing Rational Developer for Power

I think that a nice way to improve the project perspective in RDp for RPG projects or the RSE perspective, would be to be able to link diferent sources together. Right now you can right click over a source file and add a new source member, and that's it. But I think that you should consider a new way of adding items. Insted of 'add a new source member' I would love to see an option to 'add new module' or 'add new srvpgm' or 'add a new pgm'. I'll explain more in the Use Case field. With this new approach you'll make RDP more integrated with ILE, and also, you can have more information available in order to do offer more advanced features for the RPG programmer. I think that RPG is a great language and the i is one of the best platforms. We need to keep the language and the tools up to the competition. The Java Editor in eclipse or Visual Studio .NET are tools that increase the productivity a lot. If RDP starts offerring more and more advanced features to the RPG programmer, it will be an even more valuable tool and believe me, it will attract more new and young programmers....

In the Java Editor, you add a new source with different choices including 'add a new class'. In RPG you add a new source only as a new source member. This is something that I think limits the metadata that RDP have about the source that is currently editing. So the feature that that I'm proposing is:

The user rights click on the RSE or the project perspective. RDP shows the following options:

- ADD NEW MODULE
- ADD NEW PGM
- ADD NEW SRVPGM

With the 'ADD NEW MODULE' RDP adds a new source to the source file that the user selects, and also creates a prototype file in the source that the user indicates. This helps to link the source code with the prototype file (header). RDP can even have information available to automatically build the moduel.

With the 'Add new PGM' the user can select to create a new source member (as the previous option) or create a PGM from an existing module. The user can select other modules to link in the pgm.

With the 'Add new SRVPGM' the user can select a list of modules to link. Also RPG creates the binder language file related with the modules that the user selected. The user indicates the source file in which the binder language will be created. RDP can have aditional feature in the future such as: sincronize binder language, export all procedures....