Re: Solaris 2.6 x86 Report Writer?

Red We are using Actuate and have a similar setup as yours. Actuate provides a NT-based development platform with Visual Basic as a development tool for reports. The reports are generated in some proprietary format on the Unix file system and can be deployed on the web browser using a Actuate propreitary web agent (which I suspect converts the file into an HTML file for viewing). The data repository is an Informix database. Just for kicks, I wrote a Perl module which does the same thing. It takes a pipe delimited file of data (similar to UNLOAD TO filename.dat SELECT.... output) and converts it to an HTML file for viewing on the browser. It does this only once for a given file, so for future invocations of the report, it will only render the HTML file. The perl module also provides some services such as listing all available reports (it stores this data in an updateable DBM file). The advantages of my second approach (I think) is that it is portable (it will work on any platform where Perl is supported), customizable (source code supplied) and free (unbeatable cost/benefit ratio :-)). The downside is that it is incomplete and not extensively tested (and no, we are not using it here). If you are interested let me know and I will mail you a copy, If nothing else, it will give you ideas for enhancements. If you dont mind waiting a few weeks (I only get to do this at home), I will post a copy on my web site too. Oh, and BTW, to get the pipe-delimited output, I use my jselect program, a copy of which is available on the IIUG site. Hopefully this does not sound too much like an advertisement :-), but I really think that suitably well-designed homegrown scripts can solve the problem of web enablement of reports, (IMO at least) much more effectively than commercial report writer tools. HTH Sujit red_valsen@yahoo.com on 06/29/99 10:56:12 AM Please respond to red_valsen@yahoo.com To: informix-list@iiug.org cc: (bcc: Sujit Pal) Subject: Solaris 2.6 x86 Report Writer? We are developing Java web applications with servlets on Solaris 2.6 x86 using IDS 7.23UC1 (soon going to 7.30) and Apache. We would like to use a third party tool for generating reports instead of reinventing wheel. Does anybody have any experience with web-enabled report writers on this platform -- server and/or client side? Any experience with its interface to IDS? to Java? TIA