Two for the road, Report from Clerk & Nonstandard Subtotals

[John Esak]

> > I don't have time for
> > this in my personal mail and it is a tiresome chore
> > to wait and see if you
> > are going to also add the list at a later date.
> > Can't we just take this to
> > the thread I started?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > John
> >
>
> John, I don't know what you mean on two counts.
>
> #1.  I did respond the list, and it was not at a later
> time.  I did a reply all to your message, and that
> included the list.  I just double checked that.

Jeff,

I misspoke... I meant that I would appreciate it if you would NOT send
(filepro stuff) to my private mailbox. Is there really some need to press
Reply To All?  I do want the messages going to the list which is what I
meant by "including" the list. I meant "including" the list in our
correspondence, not including them in how you address your email. Sorry for
the miscommunication.
I should have just said, "Send to the list only." If I or anyone is reading
their mail. It is an extra chore to check the headers to determine if the
mail has been sent elsewhere also. In the case of the last message, it did
not ever show up in my filePro mailbox... so for whatever reason, had I
deleted the one in my personal inbox... I would have had to remember to go
and retrieve it from the Deleted folder just to answer you. As of this
writing, I still have not seen the message in the list... though if you
addressed it that way, it must have made it here. I've lost other messages.
It happens.


> #2. "Can't we just take this to the thread I
> started?".  Do you mean that you think I am off the
> topic of this thread?  I thought I was addressing your
> technique directly with a question as to why it was
> necessary to run the report from the file in which you
> are standing when you are in dclerk.

There are lots of reasons. The first and foremost is you need "some" record
somewhere. You have to get it with "some" mechanism somehow. Why do it in
another file than the one you are standing in, especially since you would
have to do just about the same trick wherever you do it. Cleaning up the
excess records, and allowing the reports to be run multi-user has to be done
on some file. If you want to use the clerk method of running the report,
then the requirement is mandatory that you find a record on which the report
can run. I don't care if it is a record in the current file you are standing
in, or a record in some other file. The trick and twist is getting that
record to hit the "end" statement.

I did, by the way, just think of one more way to do it while writing this
message. It would be stupid, but it would work. You could pre-expand a file
to a certain number of records higher than the maximum number of concurrent
reports you would ever expect to run on your system. Put a field on this
file that holds a mark. Consider the records as license slots... sort of
like Mark's OneGate approach... Start a lookup into an index of this field,
and if a record is available, use it, simultaneously "marking" it as you go.
(sorry :-( )  Then, when you're done unlock it by unmarking it. Of course,
you would have to do a getnext through the index to get to the first unused
record... and the file would have to be pre-expanded large enough to
accommodate all reports and users on your system that might be using this
mechanism at any one time. Honestly, I think the method I showed at the very
end of my long message is quite easier than this... and it consists of only
a very few lines of code.

So, do you see the problem yet? The record has to "end" eventually... or
@wgt does not ever get run.

John