Two for the road, Report from Clerk & Nonstandard Subtotals

[John Esak]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tom heine [mailto:tch at aljex.com]
> Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 7:31 AM
> To: john at valar.com; Fplist (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: Two for the road, Report from Clerk & Nonstandard Subtotals
>
>
> Hi John,
>
> An easy improvment is to use the putenv command instead of using
> a parameter.  in some cases, we give the option for 20-40
> selection critera
> in with putenv. its just more flexable to put them each in separately,
> and then use the getenv to see what to select. Our main selection screen
> is getting pretty full.

I know you didn't take the time to actually read my _whole_ message, or you
would have seen that I put a special NOTE in about how using PUTENV and
GETENV is a better alternative for this functionality. Don't blame you for
not reading it all... it was so lonnnnnnggggg. Even though I did not mean to
cover every possible thing in filePro, I did make it very clear that PUTENV
and GETENV were an improvement to the ideas I was showing... but thanks.

> Howie took it a step further and made it so we can put into a filepro file
> the file name, report name, selection set, auto prc, input prc  of the
> report you want to run. Then for each record in the reports file, it will
> show a selection in a listbox.  It makes it very easy to add or edit a
> report.  He also made it to you can define the report or processing
> from the report generator as well.  We also made samples of our
> reports, and give the user an option to just view a sample of the report,
> in their web browser so they don't have to run it to find out
> what is on it.

This all sounds very useful.

>
> Also, while you are at it, we use something we call destprt for
> the 2nd half
> of this.  You print the report to a file, and then destprt will
> either print,email,
> fax, turn it to pdf, turn it to excel, turn it to word doc, or
> display on screen.
> One nice part is that you run a report, can display it on screen,
> then decide
> if you want to print, fax,email etc. Every single report in our
> system runs
> through this, and an excellent side benefit is that if we need to change
> something, faxing for instance, we only need to change it in one place.
>
> Brian White will make the code available to the list if anyone wants it.

Who wouldn't want this? :-)  I look forward to the post. We have been doing
this for about 10 years now. All of our customer required reports can be
faxxed, emailed or printed, with filePro keeping the email and fax info on
file for easy or defaulted retrieval. Occasionally, we have the need to send
out .pdf attachments of our reports and forms which we accomplish with a
rather excellent pcl2pdf function that we simply purchased. I'm sure there
are the usual 100 free linux versions of this tool. As for this kind of
functionality in general, printing to various types of output,  well, it was
not in the scope of what I was trying to show, otherwise the message would
have been even longer than it was! So, Brian's disclosure of Howie'e code on
how to do it will be most welcomed by the list I'm sure. Thanks! To bad you
can't issue such orders to Howie, himself... :-)

John Esak