In the old days, columnar reports were an absolute must in business information systems. If you don't know, columnar reports were basically pages of data interspersed with summaries and printed out on reams of paper for distribution.
The fore-runner of TCB, PAM, used a stand-alone program to define report specifications and another program was used that read the specifications and produced the report. In the 21st century, reams of paper reports are virtually extinct.
TCB is a 21st century product. It anticipates that, not only will most reporting be interactive, but may need to be presented in ways not envisioned when the base system was created. With TCB is is easy to define entire reports, the report output format, and the distribution for the report in a single process command line. Long, complex reports are easily accomplished by appending the results on multiple SQL queries together in the appropriate format. Easy to do with TCB.
Reports can be spawned as plain text files, comma delimited files with labels (for merging with like Outlook), raw data, screen displays or in html format. Further entire document files, HTML, RTF, txt, virtually any file without binary information, can be stored and retrieved and "run" from a single field in a dataset table! Who gives you that?
The development system does have a columnar report generator, "Report Master", that generates the old type reports as well as newer reports with graphic integration.
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Contact: Fred Pierce, makpiya@aol.com, 831-663-0543