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<snip>
Crystal reports "has that built in"?  That's amazing.  I can open it up 
and tell it I want OpenOrders and it automatically joins ECL, ECH, IIM, 
etc, and, calculates onHand as IOPB+IADJ+IRCT-IISS?  Without any setup
by 
a developer or anything?  How does it know?
</snip>

Actually, it pretty well can know except people don't use the AS/400 as
a database system. 

If your database is created using normalized tables and you use
referential integrity, the relationship are known so Crystal or any
tools can suggest or show you what the relationships are. 

But, of course, how many people use the AS/400 as a database? Just slap
together a file and in most case, never even put on a unique index and
even if you want to put on referential integrity you cannot. 

This is how one of our programmers put a table together the other day.

Document number - Not Unique Key.
PONumber
ASNNumber
EdiLine  

So if you have 30 lines of EDI data, you repeat all the PONumber and
ASNNumber fields over and over in the database(There were a lot more)
over and over. 

Could not understand why this was a problem and I almost got fired
because my boss thought worrying about this stuff was unimportant.  

I finally got a set of normalized tables created but the other
programmer is still pissed because I was wasting his time. 

Now in fairness to the AS/400, I must say that I see this in SQL Server
databases too. Tables created but no referential integrity. 

If the database is created correctly, almost any GUI tool is going to
know what do.  

What I was saying about Crystal Enterprise is that you can go in and
create pre-defined views and store them in Crystal but this is still no
substitute for having referential integrity.  


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