Re: How to move forward -- MIDRANGE-L

Jeff,

Sorry to jump in late, but your project has, IMO, the simplicity of project that I would recommend to start with.

I will disagree with some about learning HTML. Here's the way I look at it: If you are creating static pages go ahead and use something like Front-page to create it. After all, it is a static page just like writing a letter in Word. You don't need to know what's under the covers. But, in your situation (and AFAIK every 'real world' situation) you will be using some language to take your report and imbed HTML code into it and output it to disk instead of a spool file. This requires knowing -what- to imbed to get your desired results. What will happen is that as you add each new function or run across a stumbling block what you have is a learning opportunity.

It would take very little to take your shipping report and make it into a web page. Get that part working then learn about anchor tags to create a link to the PDF documents. What will happen is when the customers call and ask about their order, sooner or later, they will start asking to be able to look at it themselves from the web.

I will agree with others: view the source of pages you run into and find yourself asking "How'd they do that?". Download some simple Javascript and dissect it.

You can get a free web server for your PC and experiment (I learned with Netscape Fasttrack server running on a 200mhz NT workstation).

Also, try not to be overwhelmed with all the choices. By the time you get past the HTML, CSS, Javascript and start into the next level you can decide at that time on the appropriate path and languages for you. I tried to stay as true to open standards and languages as possible in the beginning because there is (was) more help. Posting a question about using a feature of a particular proprietary approach may not get you as many pointers as a more generic situation.

I have also found that this makes learning some of the tools easier because I have a better understanding of what it is that they are trying to accomplish or what particular coding issue they are simplifying.

But that's just the way that I learn, it's certainly not the only way.

J. Kilgore

P.S. In case there is anyone else wondering where to start, here is the simplest way I found to put a report out as a web page (static, no links) add the following to the beginning of the report: <html><body<pre> and the last line should read </pre></body></html>

Create the report then do a CPYSPLF file to a file with a member name of htm or html and copy to wherever you want to serve the page from or email, sneaker network, or whatever it to the folks that need to see it. Saves a lot of trees. :)

Jeff Crosby wrote:
<<snip>>

I've got WDSC 5.0. Wonder if I could use that? I really have a specific "report" in mind that I'm interested in getting up. It is the day's deliveries by route. Invariably customers call in to customer service asking for a delivery time. By clicking on this web "report" link, customer service could see immediately how many prior stops there are. Next the customer will ask "Did I put fries on the order?" THEN customer service would click on the invoice number and the .PDF of that invoice (which I'm already storing in the IFS via FormSprint) would immediately be displayed.