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

The political advantage to Nathan's solution weighs, in my opinion anyway, very heavily in favor of an HTML solution. Users today, almost without exception, accept a web link as a report and have no problem with hitting the print button in the unlikely event they want a printout. It also gives them a copy/paste ability. Beyond that it allows non-rpg programmers to be assigned the task of prettifying the reports with style sheets. Providing an Intranet with the ability to view reports in the browser lowers training time to near-zero.

To me this choice has a lot of upsides and almost no downsides.

On 1/21/2015 11:23 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

Jon,

It sounds like you may be suggesting taking existing printer files and
transforming them to HTML - similar to how the OA vendors take existing
display files and transform them to HTML.

I'd rather suggest just starting fresh with HTML templates and generating
stream files from them. Actually, I have never considered the idea of
preserving an investment in existing printer files.

Develop a standard style sheet - using colors, fonts, and other style
elements compatible with a company theme, and reference the style sheet
from HTML templates. Don't put logic in RPG programs to modify styling,
except perhaps if a need arises to output to different page sizes from a
single program.

It seems to me that HTML and CSS offer capabilities that exceed what might
be achieved via overlays and AFP elements.

Nathan.
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