Re: Various stuff I have kicking around

From: Lee Brintle <pitt!umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu!lbrintle> Recently, I finished coding a large application for our textbooks system at our University Book Store. For the reports, we used 4GL to get the parameters from the user, then called a simple runner than ran an *ace* report in the background. In this way, the user was allowed to continue with other projects while the program was compiling, yet still had an easy way to specify the parameters and such. We do something similar. We use 4gl almost solely for data entry and combinations of everything else for everything else. When an account is updated, rather than wait for the report to generate OR putting it in background and running the risk of trying to generate too many reports at once -- updating is relatively quick compared to report generation -- we output the account number to a named pipe. At the other end of the pipe sits a report generator daemon that does one report at a time, thereby reducing the load on the machine.