Re: theory and practice: ying and yang

From: Paul <paul_at_test.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 10:49:03 +0100
Message-ID: <42a56d90$0$8716$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net>

mountain man wrote:

>>But when the external code writes a report, how does it know what the
>>column titles should be?  How wide the columns are?

>
> There is no external code. The report is written by a DBA
> (or nominated party) in SQL (from report specifications
> that have been prepared in consultation with the client
> organisation) and saved as a stored procedure, column titles,
> column widths and default sort being specified in the sproc.

What if a report with subtotals at various levels is required? Or other fancy stuff like running totals, subreports etc? Or crosstab reports? This kind of thing, which is basically presentation rather than data extraction is better done by a client tool, is it not?

You mentioned before about people having to cut & paste things into Excel if they want to play around with the data, but this sounds like a recipe for disaster, knowing some people's technical abilities. They want to click a button and have a report come up just how they want.

Paul. Received on Tue Jun 07 2005 - 04:49:03 CDT