I'm trying to create a report and I'm not sure how to accomplish part of it. I'm starting off with a launch page and ultimately I'm passing one amber variable to Web Focus. It will be the ID number of the person I'm looking for. I want the report that I'm trying to create to open in a new browser window (I know how to do that). But the problem is, I want 3 reports created and for them to be displayed in 3 different frames in the new window all at the same time. I know how to start with the frames existing with the "launch page" in the first frame and then have a summary report appear in the second frame and a detail report created from a drill down appear in the third frame. But I want all three separate reports created at the same time and diplayed in the 3 frames that are created in the new window all at the same time. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks!!!

Hello "focusqueen", I'm afraid you may have to become a JavaScript queen to accomplish what you want to do. This is a very advanced request and goes beyond what our GUI development tools can offer out of the box. The Resource Layout Painter can easily handle the frame scenario inside of the existing launch page, but there is no easy way to open a new window and then populate that window with three frames all with different outputs. Advanced JavaScript coding may handle that.

If the requirement of a new window goes away, you have more options with the Layout Painter. You won't have to use drill downs like you did before in 5.2.3. You'll be able to tie the same parameter to three different reports and three different frames. Each report and frame has it's own launch mechanism (button, image, or link) and you can house this on the same launch page which presents a very clean interface. If you must launch a new window, you could try creating a frameset that contains a "!IBI.FIL.x" block for each report output. Create a launch page that passes the id parameter to a fex that contains this frameset in a -HTMLFORM BEGIN and END block. That may work, but it's hand coding of reports and HTML. Hope this helps.

Brian is talking about one good way to do it. But - if I correctly understand your question, it's also possible to do something like this with old-fashioned HTML and the frame tag; you can set the SRC= of a frame in a frameset to the cgi path with the request parms. Like this:








... rest of your html

When this page loads, it will run three reports and these will provide the content of the frames in this frameset. Try it, substituting your reports and app information as described below...

A little background...
'IBIF_ex=RPTn' - this is the switch you pass to the WebFOCUS CGI or Servlet or whatever to tell it what proc to run. You can also use IBIF_adhocfex to run a FEX you pass inline.

'parmsetc=values' - this parm is not literal, it stands for the one or more parameters you might be passing to the FOCEXEC (e.g., to set flags, pass to WHERE statements, whatever).

'IBIAPP_app=yourapp' - I am assuming you are using Release 5.2.x and therefore that the APP logic is default for your environment.

Hope this helps!

--Bob Jude Ferrante
Technical Director
WebFOCUS Maintain Products

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Mabel>,

I've decided that I can do this without using frames at all! I'm going to create the entire thing at one time, each section being placed in a different DIV tag. I will have two different classes in the style sheet at the top...one for the DIV that will be displayed at the top (with a higher z-index) and then another for the rest that will be hidden below (with a z-index of 0). Then when I click on the buttons on the left side of the screen, the class of style sheet will change (using JavaScript), displaying the desired DIV. Then I don't have to worry about separate reports and frames.

maybe this is too simple, but what about just having your fex make 3 htmtables and then running your -HTMLFORM BEGIN
...
[TABLE][TR][TD]
<!-- WEBFOCUS TABLE tablename1 -->
[TD]
<!-- WEBFOCUS TABLE tablename2 -->
[TR][TD]
<!-- WEBFOCUS TABLE tablename2 -->
[/TABLE]
-HTMLFORM END
and putting ordinary html table constructs within this htmlform code to display, say table1 in a left cell, table 2 in a right cell, and table3 in a lower cell, all within the same table.
It will "look" like 3 inline frames....
OR IDEA #2
actually save your tables to your server and then have a launch page that calls your tables and puts them whereever you want them..either using inline frames (server side) or serversideincludes (asp pages)...i do both. if either of these ideas works foryou, holler back and i'll show you how.