michaels, ross and cole (uk) ltd.

Tips and Techniques

Adam Flynn

Senior Consultant

Topics

• “Work with” Maintainer• Report with Graph• Simple Dropdowns and Radio Buttons• Simple Report Selection Dropdowns• Report Selection Dropdown with External Object• Calendar Popup with Report Selections• Subtotal Calcs• Calendar Retrievals• Performance

“Work with” Maintainer

• *AUTOSEQ on Contact No.– Auto-generate key fields when adding

records– Put *AUTOSEQ into the Field Description on

Pre-format

• Customer Lookup smartlink

• Copy functionality

• All the Advanced Search and Sort functionality you get with Retrievers.

Report with Graph

• Several forms of graph available.– Bar 2D/3D– Stacked Bar 2D/3D– Pie Chart 2D/3D– Grouped data

• Highly customizable– Colours– Fonts– Orientation– Size– Legends

Simple Dropdowns and Radio Buttons

• Specify Validity check in Preformat– LS for dropdown list– RD for radio buttons

Simple Report Selection Dropdown

• Specify an ‘A’ as the user defined control field in Preformat.

• This causes all possible values to be used by default.

• Caution! It might take some time to populate if there are a lot of values.

Report Selection Dropdown with Ext Object

• Create a retriever with 2 fields.– First field is value– Second field is description

• Register retriever as an external object.• Use external object in the *SELECT location for the

report.• Note: The dropdown list is displayed in the sequence of

the display field not the key selection field being passed to the report. This is OK for this example but not for all cases (e.g. month name dropdown – April, August, December, etc). To fix this, set control code X against the field to be used for sequencing and control code D against the field to be displayed in the ex object retrieval.

Calendar Popup on Report Selection

• Set the User defined control field to C in Preformat.

Subtotal Calcs in Reports

• Edit the HTML template using a special syntax.– e.g. F_EXPR[9,2,J] = F_G_TN_[REV10] /

F_G_TN_[UNIT10];– Standard arithmetic operations allowed + * - /– Lots of options for the field values. The

manual describes these in full.

Calendar Retrievals

• Create a retriever that sequences over a date field.

• Specify the format of the date in the HTML template properties.– mrcDTfmt = “yyyymmdd” (The Movex

convention)

Example Applications

Performance Tips

• Turn off record count for multi-file queries.– go_lastpage = “-1”

• Turn on case sensitivity.– caseSensitive = “1”

• Build helper logicals– Helps the database optimize and execute

your sql.– Requires quite advanced tech knowledge

michaels, ross and cole (uk) ltd.

For more information

Web www.mrcuk.comEmail avigrass@mrcuk.comTel +44-20-8282-1600Mail mrc (UK) Ltd

Claridge House29 Barnes High StreetLondonSW13 9LWUK