Posted by Barbara Brazil on March 17, 2008 at 15:37:46:
Today we are pleased to introduce Comet 2008 and the beta test version of the new front-end to the Reporter. Those of you who attended the Comet Developers' Meeting last year saw the first prototype of this utility. Based on suggestions from that discussion we have reworked it and think we're on to something really good!
The Reporter back-end has also been rewritten and we've added a couple of powerful new features to it. You may now
SORT on any field from any file used in the report. Previously sorting was limited to fields from the primary file.
There's a new DEFINEFILE command that will build the #CFILES definition for
a file that is the output from your report. This is very handy if you wish to use that file as input to a subsequent report.
This is a big project. It has been in alpha test for a couple of months. I really appreciate the volunteers who assisted to get this first version ready for beta testing. Jon Sacks was a huge help testing the back-end rewrite and enhancements. Gina, Steve Auerbach, Gerry Bennett, and Marc Shevick all helped out with the front-end. Here're some comments from them:
"Quite impressive. Your installation instructions were pretty specific. Installed just fine. It is a great improvement over Viewmgr..."
- Marc
"I think this new Reporter front end could be classed as a Killer App."
- Steve
Regarding the new ability to SORT on fields from any file:
"That is a major improvement. Not only functionally, but in terms of user understanding. You should make a big deal of this."
- Steve
We expect to continue to add features to this. We'd like to add more types of output. Labels maybe? Charts maybe? One enhancement which was discussed at the Developers' Meeting is a way to limit a user's access to certain files in the Data Dictionary by assigning a security level to each file. The user's security level could be set by a new system variable. You may also want some control over which of their directories a user could use when creating new reports.
This project required an enhancement to Comet and the file server so you'll need to get completely up to date in order to try it out. A complete list of system requirements is listed in the Reporter documentation. This release also requires that your Reporter Data Dictionary be in #CFILES format. Before you install UTL version 8.00 make sure you are prepared to do the conversion. It's simple and straightforward.
So, give it a try and let us know what you think!
bb
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