Re: Text on report

The "best" way to do this varies depending on the nature of the text that
you're printing.

Does it change often?  (The difference between hardcoding the text and
putting it in a file really depends on how often it will need to be
changed!)

Where does it come from?  Namely, how will it be typed in, or is it 
generated by another program or what?  (Perhaps the data should just
be passed as parameters, or maybe its already in a file?)

Is this text all that you're printing, or does it rely on something
to be calculated/read from a file/etc?  (Maybe this could just be a
word processor document?)

How long is the text going to be?  can it vary in the number of
characters/lines paragraphs? (maybe this should be something thats
loaded & printed from a stream file? or a source member?)

I don't see why you'd ever want to put it into a compile-time array,
unless you're stuck using RPG III where you can't use eval statements :)



On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Jim Langston wrote:

> I have a report to generate that has quite a bit of text on it.  A
> whole paragraph, basically.
> 
> I'm not using the reports, but O specs in my RPG program.  I know some
> would say, and probably rightfully so, to use a report program for
> this, but I want to do this in O specs.
> 
> My question is, how do you feel would be the best way to get this long
> text data into my program to print on the page?  There are a number of
> ways I could do it, including puting it in a file, then opening it and
> reading it a line at a time into a variable and printing it out.  Or I
> could do a Compile time array and stick it on the bottom of my
> program.
> 
> I could type out the text in the O specs and just space it
> accordingly, but the rather short length of the input fields for the O
> specs for constants kinda limits me on this.
> 
> There is another type of array, I think, where I could create the file
> and then load the array with the information at run time from the
> file, though I've never done that before.
> 
> Does anyone have any other, maybe even better, suggestions?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jim Langston

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