[SHARING] Universal Concatenation in the Report Painter
by David Glick

Information Builders is introducing a long-awaited Report Painter feature, called universal concatenation, with WebFOCUS Developer Studio 7.7.0. Also known as MORE, universal concatenation allows you to retrieve data from unlike data sources in a single request to create one report.

Over the years, we have received many requests for universal concatenation in Report Painter, and the topic has occasionally come up on our Focal Point online developer community. So what is universal concatenation? A universal concatenation request is divided into one main request that retrieves data from the main data source and defines the data fields, sorting criteria and output format. Then there are sub-requests that define the data sources and fields to be concatenated to the data of the main request. The fields printed and sorted by the main request must exist in each of the concatenated data sources. If they do not exist, they need to be created as virtual fields.

So how does this work? Let’s walk through an example. Here is the request we want to create in the Report Painter:

DEFINE FILE EMPDATA
NEWID/A11 = EDIT (PIN, ‘999-99-9999’);
END
DEFINE FILE SALHIST
NEWID/A11 = EDIT (PIN, ‘999-99-9999’);
SALARY/D12.2M = OLDSALARY
END
TABLE FILE EMPDATA
PRINT SALARY
BY NEWID
WHERE SALARY GT 65000;
MORE
FILE SALHIST
WHERE OLDSALARY GT 65000;
END

Click here to see the following steps with screenshots!

Let us know if you have any questions. Enjoy!