Re: When will the IBM i community adopt HTML for reporting?

On 1/22/2015 1:48 PM, Matt Olson wrote:

In this day and age I like to use actual reporting products that can convert to many different formats. Write the report once in a WYSIWYG interface and can export to any format you wish and comes with viewers in many different programming languages (RPG not one of them though). Report design with these types of products makes things easy. Just provide your SQL statement(s) and the world is your oyster.

We have Crystal Reports here. Let's be kind and call the database
layout 'legacy'. This means that it's not at all a simple matter for
end users to wend their way through the morass of code tables, etc in
order to roll their own reports. Yes, one can create views which help
and we are doing that, but the bottom line is that right now, this
moment, a programmer needs to write that Crystal report for the end
user. And because of the sophistication of Crystal, it takes longer to
create a report than it does with RPG.

But the reason I responded is that you like actual reporting products
and we're having trouble integrating Crystal into our daily operations.
In RPG-spooled-file-world, when we run our end of day batch job, the
various RPG programs spit out spooled files; summaries of the day's
business. Same for end of week, month, quarter, etc. From the end user
perspective, they simply appear on their printer in the morning, or
their admin picks them up from our operator (for confidential reports).

How does one do that with a 3rd party reporting tool like Crystal? I
/might/ be able to coax the Crystal server into running a cron job that
fires a report at a certain time of day, but I don't know how to
integrate it so that after the end of day sequence completes, fire off
the summaries. Any thoughts?

The nice thing about this too is that you can start to parameterize your reports, and users can run them on-demand with their own criteria. Something I hardly ever see with RPG stuff. With these products it is all built in with very little to no programming effort.

Almost all of my RPG-spooled-file reports are parameterised and we are
definitely not a bleeding edge adopter.