Wasn't trying to be quick... Some people like headings that are not fancy, some people like fancy. More people like fancy than non fancy. 57 lines of code isn't squat on a hard drive that can handle 60 hours of digital video, eh? I have been programming since 1974, professionally since 1978. Could it have been done as a subr? Yeah, sure. Is a subr slower? Yeah, sure... 57 lines of code, times a 100 reports, not even close to being huge. Very tiny on a 250gb drive.
No offence taken! I was actually replying to your post, not the newbie, for *ideas*. Using a basic program to ask questions, form the headings based on the answers, form the query based on the answers, then PERFORM it creates a basic program-like output without a lot of work. And it also creates an easy to use skeleton that can be copied and modified with ease to make new reports that look fantastic, with very little work. And all questions/options handling is done in BASIC instead of proc language which does change quite a bit depending on what platform you're on, and what flavor the installation is. Remember the recent Dilbert, after creating an enormous database of actualized goals, the raises were handed out on how the employees looked. The way a report *looks* counts for *a lot* of how the programmer is perceived by management. And I don't straddle a lot of platforms. My headings are actually my own version which is similar to the ones used on Manage-2000. *All* headings on all M2K reports have almost exactly the same format, although it's a completely different code that I wrote from scratch since theirs was kind of dumb and more code... MCL makes it lower case, which is what I wanted, not MCT, remember I said this was MvBASE code. Easy to understand is only necessary for code you want to change. Sometimes when you create code that is good enough to keep the same, maintenance is not necessary. Headings, like record locking, can be written once and forgotten if enough options are written in. M2K's headings have been virtually the same since 1980 or so. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of MAJ Programming Sent: Monday, March 12, 2007 17:22 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [U2] Reports In Universe BASIC Again, some quicker methods: 1. U50BB is supported on all platforms. Use it for the Port and Account and possibly the user-id. Put this stuff in an external sub called GET.PORT or GET.ACCT or GET.USER to not re-invent it every time. Plus, if you straddle platforms like I do, I can always use CALL GET.PORT(PORT) and only platform-ize it once. 2. The Date & TIme stuff is overly fancy. Just use TIMEDATE() as it matches the 'T' part of the heading/footing string. Or use 'D'. 3. Your DAY= thing on line #3 should just be an MCT for mixed casing. 4. Does not Ud & UV support the 'C' expression in headings/footings as well as the justification "C#132"? I miss it on D3. I'm a very experienced MV programmer and to have 57 lines of code devoted to headings is, IMHO, excessive. If the home-rule 'standard' were to have consistent headings, put this in a subroutine and just pass the titles to it. I hope every program doesn't start like this. No offense, but this is a lot to show for headings to a newbie. It may intimidate and he may believe that they all must be this busy. One thing that will come from these submitted program snippets is the review and suggestions for improvement. As I have traveled on perhaps 50-60 different MV systems in my career, I've certainly seen many code samples that I want to use again and many that I want to replace. I'm not the best but I feel that I can offer up pretty useful opinions on what is easy-to read and understand code. Respectfully, Mark Johnson ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
