Posted by Barbara Brazil on May 30, 2007 at 07:57:49:
In Reply to: Re: Attention Report Generator and Data Express Users!! posted by Jon Sacks on May 28, 2007 at 18:32:44:
Jon:
I got a different idea from this suggestion than Jim did. I thought you were suggesting the Reporter be able to process a .csv file as an INPUT file. This is an interesting idea. And if we could generate a .d00 for the file on the fly it could be pretty straightforward. One problem I can see is how would we determine the field size? As I understand it string fields are quoted and stripped of trailing blanks. There is no indication of max field size.
If this is what you were suggesting, the most interesting thing about this suggestion to me is this. Several years ago we were getting lots of requests for us to export Comet data in a format that could allow external reporting apps (remember Crystal Reports) to process our data. Presumably this was because of the limited capabilities of the old Reporter. Now are you asking for these old (but tried and true) tools to process data from external sources? Interesting...
So, how could we get the field attributes needed to build a .d00 file definition from a .csv file? Or an .xml file?
bb