Creating EGL text reports

Use the EGL report engine to produce a simple text report. This engine is particularly useful for migrating reports from Informix® 4GL.
The following steps provide a broad overview of the process of creating an EGL text report:
  1. Create a basic Handler part. This program performs the following actions:
    • It declares a report variable that has access to the functions and variables of the report engine. The report engine is an EGL ExternalType part that corresponds to a Java™ class when you generate for Java and a COBOL program when you generate for COBOL. The declaration can optionally change default format values such as margins, headers, and so on. For more information on the specific values you can set when creating the variable, see Creating a TextReport variable.
    • It defines functions that are tied to specific events during report generation. See Handler events for a text report.
    • It passes control to the report engine, which calls the handler functions as appropriate.
  2. Create a report generator program. This program performs the following actions:
    • It declares a variable that is based on the basic Handler part.
    • It passes control to the handler program.

For a sample text report program and handler, see Writing code to print a text report.

The text report engine includes functions for most of the tasks that you perform in the handler, including functions to start and finish the report, to print lines, text, or white space, to manage headers and footers, and more. For a complete list of these functions, see Text report functions.

For more information on converting existing I4GL reports to EGL, refer to the IBM® Informix 4GL to EGL Conversion Utility User's Guide.


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