Re: Question about queries (in BPCS)

I might pay a can of soda for something like that. Not any more though.

What would really be useful are commonly built views. Why should a user
have to know to join this file with that file and how to calculate on hand
balance? Wouldn't that be better served by a view? For example, instead
of joining ECH, ECL, IIM and more, remembering all those silly field names
and calculating on hand and whatnot wouldn't they rather

Select CustomerNumber, CustomerName, OrderNumber, LineNumber, ItemNumber,
ItemDescription, OnOrder, OnHand, Allocated
from OpenOrderView
...
And OpenOrderView would be prebuilt. Would have all those files joined
together. Would have better fields names. Would have calculations
already done. This is all easily done with SQL. Most of this could also
be done with some intense Join Logical Files but I've gotten to prefer
views, especially for the calculations and whatnot.

If you build the right service program you can get it to do tricky stuff
like special pricing and it's not hard to create a view like the above and
have that already in there.

It's this prebuilding of views that takes away much of the so called ease
of use given by "newer" tools. The newer tools basically have you create
"meta data" and stuff that basically creates these views.


Rob Berendt