Re: Productivity/Development tools

>I am interested in hearing about any productivity tools other JBA users
>have used to enhance their package software.  We have a need for
>extensive modifications to existing programs, plus many additional
>reports and batch update programs.

We have used the Interactive Report Generator that is part of the
Interactive Program Generator (IPG) package that JBA provides.  This
generates RPG code that is quite efficient IF you pay careful attention to
the use of joins.  I suspect that we are in the category of very advanced
users of this tool.  We developed a full complement of sales reports this
way as well as most of the day to day reports used on site.  We take
advantage of the capability to use "snippets" of RPG code within the report
generator to do various tasks.  Without that use this approach would not
meet our requirements.  We had some great training and support in this area,
but I understand that the trainer we had, Brian Gartland, has since left
JBA.  Our Southern California site has had more custom RPG reports created
by contract programmers.  We elected not to do that, but use a combination
of Query/400 and IRG for virtually all of our reporting needs.

We have just recently been testing the Envisage module, actually a relabeled
version of Corvu.  This product also uses ODBC for connectivity.  This is
pretty nice for drill down analysis and charting.  It has a reporting
capability as well, but it looks a little more difficult to learn.
Performance is totally dependent on the quality of the ODBC driver set that
you use.  I highly recommend the 32 bit drivers from Hit Software running
over the NetSoft router.  That combination has very good speed even over
reasonably large files.  For very large files we tend to stay with the IRG
approach.

Hope this helps.

Bruce Stern

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