Review of EasyReporter from Speedware

Review of EasyReporter
by
Shawn M. Gordon
President
The Kompany

Introduction

While EasyReporter has been around for a number of years it is certainly not the oldest end-user report writer on the market, and depending on who you are and what your opinion of the product is, it may not even be the best. It does however have
the distinction of being the only end-user report writer that I know of, that was actually written by an end user. For those of you who aren’t really familiar with SpeedWare and it’s 4GL, the evolution of EasyReporter is an interesting one.

SpeedWare (originally Infocentre) use to market a 4GL programming language called Reactor. One of their employees in the UK decided that they didn’t like having to write Reactor code, so using Reactor he put together an environment that would allow him to draw screens and reports and then generate the Reactor code for him. This eventually became Designer, which is one of the most powerful and popular aspects of the SpeedWare environment. Well, one of the early users of Designer decided that he didn’t like having to design reports for users in Designer since it was almost easy enough for the user to do it themselves, and he put together a system that would allow the user to do just that, and he did it in Designer. One day he called Infocentre and said “hey, you may want to look at this”, and he was promptly hired and the product became EasyReporter.

(My apologies if I got any of this story wrong).

This story attests to the original power of the Reactor language, and the innovation of it’s users. Now fast forward to the present. The Reactor language has been completely re-written and EasyReporter has also been re-written to take
advantage of all the new capabilities and psuedowindowing interface. I tested the software on a 922LX .

The help facility is very robust, as you can see from Sample 2 you can get an index of topics and scroll through them, or you can enter a search string to scan through the help and pull up the topic. Once you have located the topic you can then scroll back and forth through the text.

Features

We first need to run the program so we can use it, you will want to use the UDC that is supplied since there are a lot of parameters that can be passed. See Figure 1 for example of the start up screen. You will always see this menu bar when you are using the program.

The first thing that must be done inside of EasyReporter, is to let it know about your file structures that you are going to want to make available to your users to write reports on. The different types of file structures that were available were;

ALLBASE
CISAM
FLAT FILE
IMAGE
KSAM
ORACLE
SYBASE

Although you can use many different file types, some are easier to loadthan others. If you are going to load an IMAGE type file, EasyReporter will load all the data set’s for you (expect auto masters). If it finds a field that has the word ‘DATE’ in it somewhere, it will by default set it’s ‘type’ to a type ‘date’. I am not sure if it does the same thing with the various RDBMS’s that it supports, but it is
impossible to do with a KSAM or FLAT FILE because there are no field descriptors embedded in the file structure. This just means that you have to define the field names, start position and length within the record.

Once you have your various data structures loaded, you can assign the fields alternative names that will display for the user. It is the rare data base that can be displayed to an end-user, and have them understand what each field contains. You can also set up display defaults such as date, or formatting characteristics for fields that contain something like dollars.

Once you have all your customization done you can now go and create your own record types that are groupings or ‘views’ of various data. So for example, you could link some of the fields in your Customer Master, with a couple in your Order Header, and then link that to some fields in your Order Detail data set. The user would have no idea what is going on behind the scenes, they would just see it as another record they could select to retrieve data from.

There are many other configuration options, such as security levels and groupings. Access to reports based on time to run and time of day. Date types, the language, decimal type, skill levels, etc..

Ok, so now you have all your tables, and views, and users configured. You could now go even further and control what tables and views users have access to. This can be done by creating essentially a security profile class and assigning users to this class. You can control exactly what parts of the software will be available, and what they can do with it. Now we have everything set up and we are ready to turn the users loose on it, or in this case, me.

Designing a report couldn’t be easier, you select ‘Report’ from the menu bar, and then ‘New’ from there. You now get a graphical environment where you can select the file that you want. Once you have selected the file you will ‘tag’ the items within the file that you want on the report. My only complaint here was that I
didn’t see any way to select all the items without tagging each of them individually. You can select a ‘report type’ at this point that will give you a default output type. The choices that are offered to you as a starting point are;

ASCII DELIMITED
dBASE DBF
DELIMITED SUMMARY
EXTRACT/STANDARD
Lotus 1-2-3 DDE
Lotus 1-2-3 WK1 file
MAILING LABELS
Microsoft Excel DDE
Microsoft SYLK File
Microsoft Word DDE
STANDARD
STANDARD/SUMMARY

One of he really sophisticated features that I saw was the use of DDE in the reports. You can select one of various styles for output. If you chose a spreadsheet then your report would be converted to a grid format like a spreadsheet. You can even set up the report so it runs constantly and feeds data into a spreadsheet that is displaying graphs, and have the graphs update in real time. In most cases this isn’t going to be a real good idea because of the overhead, but it is an interesting example of the use of DDE. It is important to note that they are taking advantage of the DDE within Reflection for Windows. I don’t know how it would work with other Windows based terminal emulators since I don’t know where the other emulators are at in terms of supporting Windows DDE. In other words, you need to be using Reflection as far as I can tell if you want to use DDE.

Actually you can define your own output record types entirely. The DDE, Standard, Delimited, etc., are offered as templates, but you are not limited to just them. This makes it very simple for the user to just grab the report type, and get what they want without having to worry about the mechanics of getting it there.

Now would probably be a good time to mention the Help facility. It actually works a lot like the MS Windows help facility in terms of it’s functionality. You can get an index, scan for keywords, page forward and backward, etc. Figure 2 has an example screen of what the Help facility looks like.

One piece of information that you want to make sure to remember, is whenever you get a menu item that has an , it means that you can get a selection list. This is a drop down list of valid values for this particular field. One of the nice conveniences here is that you can type in as much of the word that you are looking for that you want, and it will scan ahead to that point. This saves you some tedious scrolling.