Enhanced Runtime Support
Enhanced runtime support is provided in the following ways:
1. Reporter will run in a runtime environment (runimage), allowing viewing of graphical report definitions and running of any reports in the reporter catalogs.
• This requires access to a database with installed reports.
• Some bugs in this area have been fixed.
2. Improved error reporting. When a report is run, any errors that occur are written to the trace window. Some, optionally, may be displayed in popup windows. When run without popups (default) the report is non-interactive, thus allowing it to be run in "batch" mode.
In the Setup/Cleanup frame you can add error checking for the SQLcode that you provide. Curprocedure.dbsession.errornumber can be used to detect errors and the Reporter-defined variable "errtxt" can be used to provide the error description:
inquire_sql(errtxt = errortext);
Reports now return:
-1: error
0: no rows
>0: rowcount or OK
3. More flexible support for runtime tables. Previous versions of Reporter required tables to be included in a query that must exist at design time. It was possible that, at runtime, the actual tables used may be of different structures as long as the names remained the same and the columns being retrieved were compatible with the design specification.
Reporter now supports the use of global temporary tables and variable table names, which may be passed as parameters to the report. This is achieved through the use of example tables. An example table must exist in the design environment while the report is being specified but need not be kept once report definition is complete. An example table is required to contain only runtime compatible column definitions that are required by the report.
A table that takes part in a query can be one of three example types:
• Self – original Reporter behavior
• Temporary – a global temporary table that may already exist in the session that calls the report (in which case the same database session must be used by the report), or may be created during the setup phase of the report
• Parameter – tablename is a report variable that must be initialized at runtime. The table name passed in may be that of a temporary table. It may have a default value.
4. Reporter reports may be converted to static 4GL procedures, which can be run from any OpenROAD application independent of Reporter or its catalogs.
If the original report uses image trims, the procedure will require additional support:
• If image trims are stored in the design database, at runtime an "Image Server" frame is necessary to provide access to the images unless a copy of the Reporter design database image catalogs is accessible.
• If image trims are stored on disk at design time, a variable can be set to point to a directory containing copies of the images on the deployment machine.