Hi Laurie, It is about 5 years old, but I wrote a tutorial in 2009 about running DP on the web. The concepts are still basically the same. http://www.brileigh.net/dpweb/tutorial/index.htm
In essence DP can be started from the command line with the /EI-TLog.txt switch which starts DP and imports and processes the synthetic transaction log TLog.txt. The original Transaction log specification was included in DP as 1. a transaction backup (especially between file backups), 2. an audit log, 3. and also for import and exporting the entire database. Since it is just a plain text file, you can programmatically create it from any other program, in which case it is referred to as a Synthetic Transaction Log. In 2004 Lew and other's added the ability to include the ability to run reports specified in the synthetic transaction log. You can populate a database with data, and perform edits, deletions etc into any panel using the Syth. T-Log however I found the easiest was to have a panel in DP which you populate data from the T-Log, (I call mine the Parameters panel) and then create reports to use that data, for other data manipulation purposes, e.g., search, adding, deleting, changing data. So the T=-Log becomes relatively simple. The essential fields in the Parameters panel, are the "field name" and the "field value" fields. These are like the pairs in say a web form submission e.g., (name=Brian) and if you are only working with s single user, or single execution at a time, then these are the only fields you need. After you have processed the data, you can use your report to clean up by deleting all the data in the Parameters panel, ready for the next execution. If however you are using it multi-user, or more than one execution, you need to tell DP for which execution the data in the Parameters panel belongs to. This is done via a second DP switch the /SID-SessionID which takes a value, (usually generated randomly). I also include this field in the Parameters panel so in addition to the field name and field value fields, I include the SID value field. In that way I can specify which execution owns the data. The naturally of course means it has to accompany the data in the T-Log file. In the T-Log to specify a report, you do not use the report name, but instead its number, e.g., =R=7 ie the 7th report. You need some discipline or the DPO.exe utility to keep your report numbering tidy. Because this number if vitally import, because I do not want a report to use the wrong report on a set of data, I also add a Report Number field in the Parameters Panel, and include that information in the T-Log. It is not essential but adds security to the process. Ok, so the next part of the puzzle is how to get the SessionID from the commandline, visible to the report in DP, and that is done with the formula user.field[0]. The user.field[x] is usually used when you have users defined in the application, user.field[1] is the first field in the UserID panel, etc. But since user.field[0] was never used, Lew added it (by the way, I might not be passing on the required credits, when I say Lew, it also may have included Bruce, and Thom) to extract the /SID value. Because DP Reports are an impressive data manipulation language themselves, and act like programming a programming language, you can add highly sophisticated data activities etc, in excess of say the SQL, Data Manipulation Language in Microsoft Access, and getting close to par with the other SQL languages. But without the learning curve for DP users. If you are using this for a web database, then you have to write scripts or program, PHP, Perl, VB etc, to act as middleware between the users browser and DP. The scripts purpose is to check data, create a Synthetic T-Log, and execute DP with the required switches. If you are doing web or XML work, another useful switch is the /W switch for choosing the Latin 1 character set and the ;;W field for handling special entities that might be embedded in the data, for example "Brian & Sons" need to be outputted in HTML or XML format as "Brian & Sons". I hope this helps. Take a look at the tutorial in the link above. Good luck Brian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Laurie Corvacho Sent: Sunday, 30 March 2014 5:27 AM To: DataPerfect Users Group Subject: [Dataperf] Instructions for command-line use of DP? Thanks so much, Gerard. I was able to get VDos installed and also got the latest version of DP from Brian's link on the website. Now I'm sorry I will need some help getting back up to speed on the DP command line. (I will maybe have to check back later for help on configuring vDos correctly for Windows 8.1 64, depending on if any problems crop up.) Is there a post or file somewhere that goes over running DP from the command line? I think basically what's needed would be switches for logging in as a specific user with password, importing a file (such as either a text file or a WordPerfect merge file) and then running a report to process that import file? I vaguely recall that a report can be run from that specific user's menu, or something like that? Also, is Tim Rude's program (I think it was DPPrint) still out there as a bridge between DP and Windows printing, and can it be used with DP running under vDos? Thank you all for your help! Laurie _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dataperf _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
