Karen,
I have no idea if this is a viable alternative, but I thought it might
make for an interesting discussion.
What if you coded your report to output an XML file that could be used
by a third party report generator? XML is inherently hierarchical, as
most reports, and is pretty easy to code from what very little I know
about it. If those big text fields are cut off when output to file you
could just code it longhand with writes. As Larry said, control seems
more important than money, so even resorting to this may not be an issue.
XML is something your customer can probably buy into, and *might* have
the advantage of being reproduced out of their new multi-million dollar
system (for multi-millions you would hope it could light up and spit
nickels, so what's a little XML?<g>) that could be used by the XML
report writer after R:Base is retired.
It's even conceivable to dump the entire database as XML and a third
party product take it from there.
I've never used such a product, but if you google: XML "report
writer" there are apparently lots of choices.
Ben
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
But still, an eval copy doesn't help unless they can run it forever.
At some point they would have to actually purchase a copy, and
that's what they can't do.
The only RBase work that I can do relates to their recent
multi-million-dollar upgrade to another system. Unfortunately
they are unable to get some useful reports out of that system.
So they are sending csv files and I'm writing RBase front-end
reports for them! Although this is probably killing them
(they keep saying that "someday" the other system will produce
these reports) they realize that their staff can't work without this
RBase system in place.
But other than writing these reports, the company is forbidden to
do "enhancements" to any RBase system since the company
considers them all dead. You have to submit alot of paperwork
to get a system change. I remember one instance where I estimated
it would take 8 hours of work to do something. We had a 2-hour
meeting involving 6 people, including one lawyer and myself. It
took that to get approval to do 8 hours of work.
This is the company where I thought I had a chance of getting
RMail in there, until they found out that I had to touch the users'
computers. That killed that project. They wanted a nice neat
.dll in one place, and only there.
So .... I think the only lower odds of having them upgrade to
7.x is betting on the Colts to win the Super Bowl.
Karen
in Chicago
Believe me, working at this company is a pain. They are so
against doing anything to keep these RBase databases going, that
even if a task would take me only a half hour to do (which most tasks
are that easy, unlike the tasks for their other database products),
people
have to go through 3 levels of approval before I get the okay. Their
patents
group (which is who has this text wrapping problem)
Course Larry would have the simple, logical answer .... (-; You
could get
them an EVAL version to show them.. The price is right!
> Still would like to know from anyone using 6.5 whether they've run
into a fix
> for this problem, or any other way data will flow to multiple pages.
The wraptext deal I wrote is fairly convoluted and anything that
approximates
it would cost half the cost for 1 seat of RBase 7.x, so it doesn't make
economic sense to do that. I also thought of a couple other convoluted
workarounds (using scripting and HTAs), but again the time involved
doesn't
make sense to do it that way either. I'm with Larry on this one.
