FW: need help with dclerk

[John Esak]

Bruce4 Eaton said,

<<<<<
And even though the subject here seems to be report/clerk usage for 
non-interactive purposes, I think many developers use clerk as a 
starting place for output requests so that they can design browse 
lookups for capturing selection criteria - whether they wind up staying 
in clerk or calling a report process.
>>>>>>>

Exactly as Bruce says here. Clerk is absolutely the superior choice for any
report that even requires only one interactive request.  If there is really
nothing to ask of the user, then and pretty much *only* then *report alone
is the thing to use.

In the past, I've put up a lot of examples of why clerk gives you better
user interaction and much more error checking and "approval" stages before
you launch the report. My favorite technique is to put up a POPUP UPDATE
screen and get all the criteria from the user into dummy fields... YES,
using all the LISTBOX's and BROWSE's and any other nifty thing clerk is
capable of doing that report is not... And then passing the retrieved
parameters to the environment via putenv(), then SYSTEM out to a "rreport
filename -v sel_prc -f format ..."  where the -v process uses getenv() to
use the values placed there to produce the desired report... Records sorted
and selected just so.  

John