Re: Opinions on Oracle Reports 2.5 ?

Ann Craven wrote:
>
> Is anyone out there using Oracle Reports ?
>
> We are currently comtemplating migrating from Oracle Report writer v1.1 and
> would value opinions/advice from anyone who has already done this or who
> perhaps decided to go with a third party reporting tool (if so which one !)
> rather than use Oracle Reports.
>
> Thanks in anticipation
>
> Ann Craven

We haven't used Oracle Reports for much beyond a few toy applications. We
develop UNIX based systems for power utilities and most of our customers want custom reports without having to think. The solution that we developed
uses a product called applix. Applix is a UNIX spreadsheet that allows you
to access a number of RDBMSes using most of the constructs that you would
use a Lotus type of spreadsheet.

If you are not C and pro-C phobic, (it's ok if you are, there's alot of us out here), you can take it a step farther and develop "addins". An addin is a chunk of C and/or pro-C code that define one or more spreadsheet
functions. You could create a specialized function to access a table. In our
case, we're pulling up historic measurements, and our addin function looks like

_at_rdg(a1,a2,a3)

a1 is a spreadsheet cell that contains the date of the measurement a2 "" " " " " " time of """""""""""""""

a3 """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" identity code of the

We get away with this because our application is highly specialized, and chances may be good that you don't want to go through this kind of investment,
but if you can endure the developement, (it took a new guy that we hired off the
street a couple of days to do the first addin) it will reduce the amount of
training for the end-user.

You can find out more about applix at http://www.applix.com/

I hope this helps.

-allan hicks Received on Wed Jul 10 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST