Re: HTML and PDF Reports

["Dave Odom" <Dave.Odom@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nathan,
 
Thanks much for sharing what you've done.  I, and management, would prefer I not create code that no one else here except me and MAYBE one other guy can understand.   The predominant languages here are REXX, .NET and VB, if any programming is to be done.  Ther has been some experimentations with PHP.   NO user here, even a power user/knowledge worker, would learn RPG as it's not a standard language except in the vendor packages on the i5 which are maintained by the vendor.  What power users/knowledge workers WOULD use is a good query, reporting and analysis tool, like QMF, now DataQuant or, hopefully, one day, MicroStratagies tool set, or SPSS or the like; the latter too when they get sophisticated enough to use robust data analysis tools.   Between the vendor supplied reports that come with the applications and good query and analysis tools, they will be able to get all they need for reports.  When they see the dashboards and graphs I create with DataQuant, I suspect they'll like those as well and create some of their own.
 
Thanks again,
 
Dave
 

> > > Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 5/19/2008 21:08 >>>
> Dave Odom wrote:
> RPG has it's place in the old programming languages home.
> Move away from the albatross that makes the platform so
> "out there" when compared to other platforms.

I'm just starting to test RPG to generate HTML and PDF stream files, but 
I'll share a prototype with you.  I agree that RPG is geared toward 
programmers and production applications, but I think that if you give 
power users a set of HTML templates and RPG report templates which they 
can modify and some training, this type of reporting is within their 
reach.  I speak from experience.  I was a power user who learned how to 
write reports early in my career.

If you view the source for the HTML template you can see how it's 
divided into multiple record formats (REPORT_TOP, PAGE_HEAD, TYPE_HEAD, 
CODE_DETL, and REPORT_END), comparable to a multi-band structure that 
one might design with Crystal Reports:

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/apps/reports/xcd500/xcd500.html 

If you do a print preview on the report you can see the page breaks:

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/apps/reports/xcd500/report.html 

And the RPG code could be copied and adapted to other data files:

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/apps/reports/xcd500/xcd500.txt 

Nathan.