Re: Local variable acting static in 4GL report

thillick@aol.com (Thillick) wrote: :The Informix 4GL Report 'Function' is not a function at all. The reports :work as 2 pass program. The main part(s) of the program are the first :pass and the REPORT(...) is the second pass. After the first pass is :complete the second 'pass' takes over and performs the ORDER BY, :AFTER/BEFORE group and output formatting. To do some tricky things it is :often necessary to use values declared at the top of the source code (i.e :global to the module) and manipulate them yourself as needed (ala :COBOL/RPG II and no I'm not that old). : :This is still the handsdown best report tool I've ever seen for a :professional programmer. I wish Informix would do some updating and at :least make 4GL usable with ODBC etc. But it does. It's part of NewEra. Now the problem there of course is it does output via the standard MS Windows printer driver. You have to use a fixed size font and have little other control over the printout. If Informix had understood what a golden product they have here they would have extended it with print ... at x,y and print ... font(fontnumber) where fontnumber could be set at runtime to some available font. (And of course print ... at x,y font(fontnumber).) Without this it is almost useless as you can't easily control fonts directly as we do on Unix in 4GL by printing printer control codes (as far as I know). These extensions should of course have been made in the 4GL language as well, and could have been implemented with a fairly simple printer driver. Obviously some line "graphics" functions would have been very helpfull as well to print horizontal and vertical lines and boxes. We have had to implement this kind of functionallity for ourselves, but the report no longer looks very nice, and isn't easy to maintain. Obviously the next thing is to make it available as a Java class library (or a Java Bean). One can allways hope... Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org