RE: Text on report

You received a lot of interesting ideas for your question, but IMO there were lots of suggestions that were really bad.  It bugs me when programmers design a solution using user spaces, arrays, API's, etc, that no one will ever be able to figure out down the road when a simple solution (like a physical file) will do the job just fine!

At our company we have lots of tricky solutions which could have been set up more simply, but instead cause everyone lots of headaches.  I'm sure with your msg question any method would work OK, so you can't go too far wrong.  Its just that I see so much complexity on a larger scale when often times things could be much simpler!

As far as using an AS/400 message file, it might work OK for what you are trying to do today, but can you:

        Add more switches to the msg records to control processing (such as a public/private flag)

        Join msgs to other records using OPNQRYF?

        Join msgs to display using Query/400?

        Read records directly using RPG / Cobol / SQL / etc?

        Download the msgs to a PC file?

I dont know too much about the AS/400 msg files, but I dont think you can do any of the above directly using msg files.  You would probably have to copy the msg records to a physical file first, if you could do them at all.

Plus the msg text is very long.  I usually limit the amount of text to smaller sizes.  How would you control the msg length?  For example for a department name, you might want to limit the length to 20 or 25 characters.

What advantages would a msg file provide?

I have a file like this with messages, invoice msgs, credit reason codes and descriptions, department codes and descriptions, etc, etc.  Each group of msgs has a different Msg_Group name.

One mistake I made in my first post:  Dont make the sequence # numeric !!  Use alphanumeric, then you can use it for credit reason codes such as SP=spoiled, DM=damaged, etc.  This error goes against my first rule of database design:

Rule #1: Never build keys as numeric fields!  (always use alphanumeric)

Rule #2: If you must build a key as numeric, see rule #1 !

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Langston [mailto:jlangston@conexfreight.com]
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 12:55 AM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Text on report

This brings up a good point, Joel.

How about if I put the text in a message file?

That seems like a logical place for it, after all.  I didnt' think about this, but you brought
up a very good point, and looking at your key data, this is almost the exact same information
in the key info for a message file.

Any thoughts?

Regards,

Jim Langston

"Stone, Joel" wrote:

>
>
> In addition to the good advice you received about placing the data in a file (and the bad advice about using eval / arrays), I will add my 2 cents.

>
> There will probably be other reports with other text messages.  Pretty soon you will have a dozen files, all for the same purpose.

>
> If you create a file now with a key prefix, you can use the same file for all reports, and write only one maintenance program for them all.

>
> Fields could be something like:
>
> field-name    length
> Msg_Group       10
> Msg_seq         3 numeric
> Msg_data        78
>
> For the application you are working on today, the Msg_Group name could be "PURCH01", Msg_Seq would be 1 thru 12 for twelve lines of text, and the data is 78 long so it can fit on one line of a green screen.

>
> As you add more apps, you can simply add more Msg_Group records.  For example if you need text on an invoice next month, add records where Msg_Group = "INVOICE".

>
> You can add more flags onto the end of the file above too.  For example, maybe you want a flag such as Msg_Public  (Y/N)  so you can have some msgs for internal reports, and other msgs for public (customer) reports.

>
> Also maybe you want a change date and used-id field, so you know who changed the msg and when.

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