Reports Designer 2.5 question

You are going to see my posts a lot on this newsgroup!

I am trying to learn Oracle Tools (Forms,Designer,Browser,Reports), starting with Reports 2.5.5.2.7 for Windows 95 / NT eventually linking to Oracle on Unix, but for now linking to the local Oracle 7 database on the PC. I don't have access to manuals yet , have no colleagues/ peers who can help me and no training. I will try to keep my posts sensible.

I am getting by, for the moment, with my existing RDBMS knowledge and the online help you get with the tools, but I have quickly learned that the online help isn't very detailed - thus my need to question the Newsgroup!

My first experiment is with a table with the following columns :

CUSTOMER, PERIOD, PRODUCT, REGION, SALES, YEAR

• Question 1 :I managed to insert data into the table via singleton inserts using SQL*Plus: Release 3.3.3.0.0, but there must be a better way to get 180 rows in a table than this?

I managed to create a master detail report with customer as the first break, followed by year and then the rest of the data as detail. The report is getting the data out but not in the format I want it. I discovered confine and flex (but don't really fully understand what they do properly), but every time I modify the layout significantly I get errors such as : REP-1305: Warning: Frame '<frame name>' intersects but does not enclose object '<object name>'.

• Question 2 : This frame stuff is confusing me a lot, are there any web based resources which might explain modifying report layouts /reports in general in better detail than the online help?

Eventually I want my report to look something like

Customer : x
Year : y

YTD_Sales Product Region Period Sales

300        ABC      East    6       120 
300        ABC      East    7       150 
.

Total for year y : 3456
Total for customer x : 5678

Now based on experience with other less sophisticated tools I think that YTD sales may be a problem because you don't know what they are until you get to the last row for a particular customer,year,product combination.

• Question 3 : Is there an easy way to achieve something like this in Oracle?
• Question 4 : Is this the best newsgroup for questions like this? Do Oracle provide a free newsgroup server like Microsoft do, if so is it any good?

Thanks for your patience; I will be back soon!   Received on Mon Aug 10 1998 - 16:27:28 CEST