Kevin wrote: >Hey All, > >It seems to me that Fileman is missing a report >generator. Perhaps I am just overlooking it.
You overlooked it. The Search and Print options from the roll-and-scroll interface give you quite powerful reporting capabilities. If you augment Fileman with M2Web, then you will have additional capabilities for doing database queries from a web browser and a great many additional options for formatting the results on-the-fly, including switching the output type from html to xml or xls. >A database should be able to easily allow the user to >say: >--Give me all reports >--Of the following date >--With field .12345=Value > >When I have written before about during searches on >multiple fields, I have been told to use FIND^DIC and >create custom screening code that checks for the >secondary and tertiary factors. Why was that? Was is because you were trying to do the searches from a non roll-and-scroll interface or because of some perceived inadequacy of the Search module? >But does use of fileman require programming skills? Not really, but advanced users would benefit from knowing something about MUMPS functions and operators for specifying calculations on data values - and Fileman conventions for referring to data field values and for extending data field references from one file to another. >Furthermore, its a hassle to try to get one's entire >screening logic compressed into one line of screening >code. > >If this tool is not currently available, it seems it >should be fairly easy to create. If that would be easy for you, then you are a far better programmer than anyone I know and you are wasting your talents and valuable time working as a mere doctor. ;-) Perhaps you could help out with developing a general web interface to Fileman and VistA databases - that could be world changing. :-D I do think that you deserve a great deal of credit for the work you have done in learning MUMPS and VistA so far and in getting VistA to work for your clinic, but I suspect that you are thinking of a much more retricted and less general tool than your words suggest. It would be great to have a general search tool that would be capable of generating relatively efficient queries on any set of fields in a database as complex and potentially large as VistA while presenting a comprehensible and relatively safe user interface to non-programmers. That is actually one of my top personal goals and projects for VMACS web and M2Web. I have been thinking about it for a long time and have built many partial solutions for VMACS and major parts of the needed infrastructure for a general solution. I have recently been given the freedom and direction to seriously focus on developing it. I have made some good recent progress towards a general interface for formatting reports from Fileman and other MUMPS databases that includes some promising new techniques that I will apply in the near future to assist users in the construction of conditional expressions for searches. You can get a hint of this from a set of screenshots that I put up at http://vista.vmth.ucdavis.edu/notebook/index/49.html. If you click the "M2Web Demo" link at the top of that page you will find links to live examples and documentation. If you try the examples, please use a current version of Mozilla or Firefox if you can. I know that IE does not correctly handle some of the newer features, but I don't have the time yet to troubleshoot it. --------------------------------------- Jim Self Systems Architect, Lead Developer VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis (http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself) ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IntelliVIEW -- Interactive Reporting Tool for open source databases. Create drag-&-drop reports. Save time by over 75%! Publish reports on the web. Export to DOC, XLS, RTF, etc. Download a FREE copy at http://www.intelliview.com/go/osdn_nl _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
