Classics Forum

Re: What are you using to produce nice looking rep

Posted By: David Gerdt
Date: Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 7:32 p.m.

In Response To: What are you using to produce nice looking reports (ROGER BURTON)

Well, I'm new to the 4GL arena, having only been working in it for about a year and even then not exclusively and mostly in a maintenance role, but one of the projects I've been working on relates to that very thing. We had a setup very similar to what you mentioned and it, too, was a bear to maintain.

Basically we used a word processing program to create a formatted report with fields that could be inserted later, a perl script took the pcl from that report and made a template from it, the Informix report generated data in a custom tag language, a perl script merged the data into the template, and the 4GL threw that out to a printer. If we need to convert to pdf, we use Ghostscript (though this isn't possible in all cases).

The new approach we've taken is to use the report functionality of Informix to generate the data we need in an XML format. Then we use Apache FOP to generate the formatted output. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the basic drift. The nice thing with FOP is that, just as you've mentioned, you can generate multiple output formats from the same data/stylesheet.

We haven't rolled it out into production yet, and when we do it won't be across the whole organization until we see how things go, but things look good so far.

There are a couple of drawbacks
- PCL generation, which we rely on, cannot be safely multithreaded due to what appear to be threading issues with the java2d subsystem. If you can safely guarantee Postscript support in all your printers, you don't have to worry about this. If your report printing is minimal, you could skip the concept of a server altogether and just fire off a new process for each request. In that case you wouldn't have to touch any Java code.
- The Java skills required are pretty minimal, but it's still another technology to support
- XSLT can be confusing. It's just really verbose and because it's a declarative language it does require some adjustment. Given that your report structure probably doesn't change very often, this probably isn't a huge deal, but if you have a lot of different reports it could be.

The good stuff
- You have pretty fine grained control over every aspect of how the data is formatted
- PDF, PCL, PS, TIFF, RTF, and other formats just by using a different command line switch
- Open standards, freely available tools, good user base/support community

Dave

>>> "ROGER BURTON" <rogerb@ahearn.com> 9/9/2008 3:34 PM >>>
Hello all,

I'm VERY NEW to this game - forgive me if I've slotted this in the wrong
place, but it seemed the most appropriate option of those presented to me. I'm
sure I'll hear about it if there is a better place.

I have used Informix-4GL (exclusively) to run the bulk of our operations and I
would like to continue to follow this path. Until recently, the production of
"documents" (Invoices, POs, Statements ...) was accomplished by running an
Informix Report and invoking a "form" (created with a third-party bit of
software that was stored as a "macro" on an HP printer) as an overlay. The
static portion (a.k.a. the pretty portion) of the document being the Macro,
and the data (the dynamic portion) being supplied by the Informix Report. It
looks respectable; monochrome and a little plain, but respectable.

This has served us well for many years. However, this solution is becoming
more and more difficult to support as the original (forms generation) software
is becoming more and more antiquated [it came on 5 1/4" floppies - just to
give you an idea]. Enough is enough, I said, time to re-evaluate. I further
speculated that this (the IIUG site) would be a good mechanism to poll what
others (YOU) are doing if you have a similar situation in YOUR environment.
I'd like to know how others (you) are resolving this?

Resolving the aforementioned would be great, but if your solution also
encompasses the conditional creation of a PDF file that can be e-mailed, that
would make for a more complete solution. (And I'd look like a superstar around
here.)

I am grateful for ALL input and I thank you in advance.

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Messages In This Thread

• What are you using to produce nice looking reports
  ROGER BURTON -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 3:34 p.m.
  • RE: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    McGrath, Colin -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 3:59 p.m.
  • Re: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    Art Kagel -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 4:10 p.m.
  • RE: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    McGrath, Colin -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 4:19 p.m.
    • Re: RE: What are you using to produce nice looking
      ERICK NASSAR -- Monday, 27 October 2008, at 11:52 a.m.
  • RE: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    Joel W Schumacher -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 5:02 p.m.
  • Re: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    DOUG ANDERSON -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 5:21 p.m.
  • RE: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    Miguel Caldera -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 5:59 p.m.
  • Re: What are you using to produce nice looking rep
    David Gerdt -- Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at 7:32 p.m.

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