| December
1999
e-reporter
deploys 3000 reports over the Web
New utility
works though a few rough edges to create Web pages
automatically
Review by Shawn
Gordon
Everybody wants
everything on the Internet these days. Remote access, file transfers,
batch reports. A few of the issues for batch reports from your HP
3000 are getting them formatted in HTML (especially if you don’t
have the reports’ source code), and getting them to the
destination Web server in an automated fashion. e-reporter will allow
you to set up all the various parameters required to intercept a
batch report, insert HTML, and FTP it to your Web server, all
automatically.
e-reporter acts
like a forms printing package such as Fantasia or FlexForm, allowing
you to establish external controls to intercept and format various
spool files. There is a fair amount of configuration that can be done
through e-reporter — if you look at Figure 1 you will see an example of what
the HTML Overlay Maintenance provides.
Pretty much all
the parameters are optional, but some become required if another
field was selected. For example, the Header Logo Width field becomes
required if you specify a Header Logo.
How does it
work?
By creating HTML
overlay definitions and setting up the SpoolMap entries, you can then
select what reports get merged with which overlays. Look at Figure 2 for an example of SpoolMap.
Another useful feature is e-reporter’s Web site maintenance
page. You are able to configure as many Web servers as you want
within the system, and then when you go to set up the SpoolMap entry
you specify the name of the Overlay and the name of the Web site for
the spool record. You can have multiple Web server destinations for a
report as well.
The only snag I
saw in this overlay design was that there is no way to get a pick
list of values available from previously defined tables, such as the
Overlay and Web Site. You’ll need to know what the values are.
There is an option in the online program to list the values, but then
you must write them down, or remember the value and go back and enter
it, to pull up the record.
Once you have
configured your various options, then you need to launch the
background job — which scans the spool files and processes them
through the HTML Overlay and transfers them to the Web site that you
defined.
Features
The Overlay page
allows for configuration of all sorts of neat things, as you can see
from Figure 1. It’s especially nice to be able to specify the
colors in English. There is an appendix at the end of the manual that
has a list of 140 different colors that you can specify. You can put
in the font size and type, as well as headers and footers for the Web
page. There are some neat tricks that you can do with the overlays or
in your code like embedding Javascript, or various links to telnet,
FTP, e-mail, or other Web pages. I didn’t try them, but there
isn’t any reason why they wouldn’t work.
There is a nifty
feature you can use when configuring a Web server to test the
connection. I tried putting in valid and invalid entries, and the
program was able to correctly determine if the server existed or not.
I liked this touch as a matter of completeness.
There is a bit of
a chicken-and-egg syndrome with e-reporter — some configurations
require other configurations to be done already, but it’s not
immediately obvious what needs to come first. An option to
dynamically add required information would be nice. I’ve talked
with Bonnysoft about it, and hopefully they will add it in a future
release.
Once you are done
configuring, you just stream the background job and let it collect
the information. The performance hit is going to be dependent on how
many spool files are on your system. The software doesn’t appear
to use HP’s Architected Interface for interrupt-driven spool
processing. But it does appear to tailor its redirected SPOOLF output
based on the criteria you specified in the SPOOLMAP entries, so maybe
it’s not too bad.
Installation
and Documentation
You can download
the demo from the Bonnysoft Web site or have it e-mailed to you. My
files were delivered in a Reflection Label format (I believe they
need to support MiniSoft’s format as well). They use a
store-to-disk file, so you upload a job and the file, stream the job,
and it creates the accounting structure and restores the files.
Installation was very easy, and no problems were
experienced.
The documentation
is very nicely done. It is 48 pages, so it’s not overwhelming,
and there are plenty of screen snapshots and examples. The program
itself has online help and each field is explained as to the type of
data it expects — a very clean setup overall.
The Test
Drive
I didn’t run
a large-scale test of the product, so my testing report is based on
just setting up a couple of SpoolMaps and a single Web server and
single overlay. Configuring was very simple and only took a few
minutes. I then set up some spool files to process. What I was most
interested in was how e-reporter handled simple PCL escape sequences.
We like to have everything print landscape and compressed at our
site, and we also do a bit of underlining.
I was
disappointed in this regard. e-reporter doesn’t appear to make
any effort to convert carriage control sequences, or stripping escape
sequences. Consider the following HTML snippet:
<FONT
FACE=”courier new” SIZE=3 COLOR=”#000080”>
<PRE>
E&l1o8D&k4S&k9.6H
1Run Date: 11/11/1999 5:58 AM #J245 CLAIM
LOADING ERROR REPORT Report: BR6002
Client:
Page: 1
REVIEWCO
&d0D
RECORD # CLAIM # FIELD NAME FIELD VALUE
MESSAGES
&d@
THE CLAIM FILES HAVE NO ERRORS
1
RECORDS: 4
REJECT: 0
</PRE>
First,
you’ll see the line of data with the complex escape sequence
that got left in the HTML. Next you’ll notice the ‘1’
in front of ‘Run Date,’ which is what the carriage control
for the page eject go translated to. After that you will see the two
escape sequences to indicate underline, and then end
underline.
I’ve spoken
to Bonnysoft, and at a minimum they will be translating carriage
control into blank lines and throwing away page ejects. The escape
sequences are trickier because they can be embedded inside of text
strings. There are some things they can do with relative ease to take
care of the common cases, but maybe they should come up with a
translation table that you can configure externally.
Conclusions
I was thinking
about writing a product like this at one time, and just never got to
it. A lot of people might think it’s not a hard thing to do, but
for less than the product’s cost of $500, you can hardly write
it fast enough to make it worthwhile. Bonnysoft has done a nice job
of putting this package together. There are still some rough edges,
and some ease of use issues that need to be worked out, but I’m
sure that will come with time.
By the time you
read this review, I believe Bonnysoft will have addressed some of the
issues that I have talked about. Bonnysoft is very keen to hear ideas
for enhancements and even sent me a list of tricks you could do in an
overlay file that were pretty cool, so they are really thinking about
how to expand the product.
I’m dealing with an issue right now of
Web-deploying reports, and it’s a bit of a trick. Finding
e-reporter was good timing for me. The flexibility of having multiple
Web servers defined as destinations for the final report was very
convenient. If carriage control and escape sequences aren’t an
issue for you, then this product is certainly something worth looking
into if you are interested in Web deployment of reports.
Shawn Gordon,
whose S.M. Gordon & Associates firm supplies HP 3000 utilities,
has worked with 3000s since 1983.
|
