I am building a BV that will emcompass several UDB-hosted tables for which synonyms already exist. This will replace a join structure that appears in multiple reports. (yes, I read Working w/ BV in rel 7.7.01+)

Here's a few questions that arose on this maiden voyage.

1. Editing mechanics question -- setting PARENT.

As I added segments, the tool assumed each was a child of the last segment. The Properties box did not help much -- the PARENT attribute there is read-only. Did I miss something? (I finally resorted to editing it in text view.)

2. Editing mechanics question -- adding a FOLDER.

I want to have an explicit list of fields available in the view -- if only to reorder the columns and eliminate the duplicates introduced by the joins.

I could not find any means to do that, short of manually in the text view. Am I missing something?

3. What is the utility of folders?
What purpose would be served by introducing multiple folders? (Perhaps to isolate fields from the right side of a left outer join?)
If you have multiple folders , how do you express (syntactically) the relationship, and how do you induce the appropriate relationship via the graphic tools and wizards?

No takers?

The nice thing about setting up the Business View with segment references followed by explicit list of fields in the FOLDER section is that the segments (essentially specifying the underlying JOIN structure) can be replaced, for tuning purposes, with a differenrt structure that covers all the referenced fields, w/o touching the FIELD list.

That provides degrees of freedom for tuning the report. You can rearrange the data, w/o any effect on the report's output.