syatem command and dummy fields

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 10:17:14PM -0400, Dennis Malen wrote:
> Just want to report that the following works. This opens up a tremendous 
> amount of opportunities to control reports that are to be run and which can 
> be changed on the fly without entering processing.
> 
> -------   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -
>   ~ If:
>   Then: ba=7;bc=8
> -------   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -
>   ~ If:
>   Then: system "/appl/fp/rreport"<(ba)<"-f"<(bc)<"-v vrab -a -u"
> 
> Thanks to everyone. This is extremely efficient for us. Hope this helps 
> someone else.

It will, but it will tie up an extra license.

And the parens are optional; you're not putting your ba and bc
variables in a context where filePro expects literal strings.

For extra credit, you can *write the output processing as a text file*
from the processing which calls it.

I went a step further than that, 25 years ago on ... damn; I don't even
remember.  IBM Datamaster 23?

Yeah; the basic was the system language, and a miserable batch
language; no DOS.

We wrote our menu programs in BASIC, they wrote batch files to call the
apps after writing the parameters into... damn, I don't even remember
the details.  I do recall we had one place that was 5 layers deep,
though:

BASIC->BATCH->BASIC->BATCH->BASIC

I thought it extremely elegant at the time, but I was also, like 17.
It was probably hackery of the worst order.  ;-)

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
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