Hi all,

I work for a market research firm in St. Paul, MN, USA. Our industry focus is on combustion engine powered equipment. We track production history, create production forecasts, and calculate in-service populations of equipment and the engines that are installed. We track this equipment down to the specific make/model including the make/model of the engine. Over the years we have added additional components to our data set (i.e. transmission, fuel injection equipment, turbos, even lubricant and emission specifications.

When a customer subscribes to our data they also get access to the Business Intelligence Dashboard and some very flexible ad-hoc reporting applications. I'm trying to come up with a way of delivering this information more in the manner of a parts catalog or, even better, an online shopping tool. That's a paradigm most people are familiar with these days. You know - log on, browse through categories, maybe do a keyword or part number search, refine your search results, select items to compare side-by-side, add items (a.k.a. records) to your cart, and check out (a.k.a. retrieve your data)

Have any of you done anything like this using WebFOCUS? If you have, will you please share some of the lessons learned from your experience? Anything from how to structure the data 'catalog' to how to develop the interface will be much appreciated! Any good books or web resources on the subject?

Thanks!

Dan

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Dan, I am working on a project that is more akin to an online 'application' than it is a report (albeit less involved than what you're wanting to do). I'd be happy to share some code with you and discuss.

In short, I am using the ON TABLE HOLD AS H001 FORMAT HTMTABLE judiciously and the -HTMLFORM BEGIN/END with my own styling and !IBI.FIL.H001; to place the blocks on the page.

My forms call MRE programs and use hidden fields and form fields to pass data around as QueryString parameters.

I use 'Reentrant FOCEXECs' with an 'ACTION' value to skip around in the FEX.

I'd start by taking a look at a couple interesting posts:
http://forums.informationbuild...1057331/m/2597085606
http://forums.informationbuild...1057331&m=3957000406

Add to that any post by JG or FreSte, they're geniuses on this subject.

-ABT