WOW... I don't know what to say, but: Wow, gotta work on that attitude.

Why not show us an example of WHAT YOU WANT. WebFOCUS isn't as "crappy" or as "clunky" as you think it is... I've been using FOCUS / WebFOCUS since 1983 (so, last century, I know) and have found that we can do more then some people think, "In WebFOCUS". So, bring it and see what we've got!
Yes We Can! BTW: That's WebFOCUS, not WebFocus, I'm talking about.

Really...?

I agree Doug...

What are you doing that is so crappy?

Hi Doug,

My attitude is fine. Happy little camper, even - but c'mon are you honestly gonna try and tell me that the table returned from Webfocus is not extremely basic and missing elements and attributes? I said the "table" is "so last century" - I didn't diss the whole enchilada. For the most part I like WebFocus. I'd like to see some better language constructs but IB pushes the GUI so hard that I doubt that's gonna happen. Anyway, I've been using WebFocus for four years now and it's a powerful tool with a scripting language that can do lots of things. I know that there are multiple ways to accomplish the seemingly impossible with WebFocus and that points to it's strength as software tool. I'm down with it but I'm not down with all of it.

Sooooo - an example: Let's say I return a table grid with 50 rows. I'd like to be able to select two or three rows (via a checkbox perhaps) and graph the data. Or access the underlying table cell data and do further processing from there.

Another example: I'd like to click a little arrow or something next to a row (master) and have additional rows (detail) expand below the row data. Yes - I could drill into a separate window with the detail data but that is disruptive to the user's experience. Sooooo - last century.

Thanks,

Norb

Well sounds like you are asking for Active reports. Also are you familar with QuickData?

No Problem, No offense intended either... You must admit that “an attitude” did come through your initial post, it got me a bit riled.

WebFOCUS has come a long way since the last century, and a lot of what you want to do can be done via the style sheet and or the use of DEFINE FILE (Check boxes, etc). OLAP , Active Reports, and Flex reports are so This Century… Check out the capabilities here and some of my stuff, and so much more …

Doug

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

Prarie,
Thanks for reminding me about QuickData. I just brought in my QuickData disk today as a potential solution here. How could I have missed that one? I'm sure there's much more to satisfy Norb.

Norb, I've also looked at the JQuery solutions for grids, back last year when I was looking for Tree Grids. The most functionally usefull were pay to play grids so we went the Active report way. There are alot of things we like and few we don't but overall, our users like them and it saves a lot in development time for doing some basic things like alowing users to dynamically sort columns.

Anyway, you may find these 2 external grid widget product links helpful:

http://dhtmlx.com/docs/product...tmlxGrid/index.shtml
http://www.treegrid.com/treegrid/www/

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

I've done some past work with Ext and JQuery. They are all be supported seamlessly if do a little work to the WebFOCUS web application. How's your Java?

I've built Java Filters in the past that have used XSL to converted the WF XML to Standard XML, JSON, RSS.xml ... anthing really.

All you have to do is take control of the http response and you do anything you desire.

So, you see Norb, there's a lot of possibilities and power associated with WebFOCUS.

Keep the suggestions coming...

"No one can do everything. But, if everyone does something then everything gets done." ~ Millicent

Just another note: we're using JQuery here to build our dashboards. Although it's not exactly the "out of the WebFOCUS box solution"; it's what they're using and what they want and I'm here to please, so that's what I'm using.

Hi All -

@prairie - I've looked at Active reports in detail and have found that for anything more than the simplest reports, our users are confused and overwhelmed. When the reports are complex then the menus and results are ambiguous. In addition, with anything other than the smallest record sets the performance is slower than molasses in January. At least that's been my experience thus far. I also didn't consider quickdata since it's an Excel plug-in. Everything I'm doing for this project is browser-based.

@doug - Flex might be nice but it's not in the budget nor am I real keen on getting up to speed with it. I put a few weeks dinking with it last year without IB's Enable and it was a bugaboo. I've done the "checkboxes" on the grid via defines but had issues referencing them correctly. I'm gonna check out the links that you included. Thanks.

@davsmith - I'm willing to pay for a decent widget that can add some slick functionality. Dynamically sorting columns is a standard feature of our reports now and the users expect it. I don't do it via Active Reports though because of the issues I mentioned to prairie, although it is convenient to have it pre-built by IB, I code it via recursive calls to the fex and the performance is good. I'm gonna look at the links to the widgets that you included. Thanks for bringing them to my attention.

@dhagen - I'm gonna look up the Ext stuff and research all the jQuery grid plugins. My java is non-existent but my javascript isn't bad. I've never used XSL - that's the style sheet for XML, right? Sounds like I'm gonna need to transpose the WebFocus results into a format that is suitable for use with the plugins. So I gots some learning to do for XSL or write out JSON or my own XML. I'll see what I can do. Thanks.

This is cool. I've got some stuff to check out. I'm still of the opinion that it would be sweet if IB would provide a better HTML <table> object. And they just might when version 8.x comes out. I saw some pretty cool stuff at Summit last year with regards to dashboard design. Yes - the dashboard tools are arcane and CLUNKY!!!. Uh huh - I went there. Soooooooooo............. I wasn't trying to get anyone uptight. But I'm gonna calls 'em like I sees 'em. The baby (WebFocus) is not ugly - but it needs a diaper change now and then.

Have a great weekend,

Norb

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Norb Eckert,

Understood... See you at Summit this year? Let's hook up then...

A couple of points you need to know if you decide to use JS.

There is a JS command for IE only that applies XSL to XML. If you are using a browser other than IE then you are SOL. I use to have a working example of this, but it was deleted a long time ago. I do remember that I used an AJAX call to retrieve the XSL, and then another AJAX call to get the WF XML.

XSL is a stylesheet for XML, however, the resulting document does not have to be XML. If you can build an XSL to convert WF XML to a more standard form of XML, then you can use XSL to transform the WF XML to JSON as well.

Norb,

Edit your first post and change both of the <table> tags to be &lt;table>, <div> to be &lt;div> and the <tbody> and &lt;tfoot> accordingly so that the posts look right.

As DHagen suggests, I would encourage you to look at XSL and taking control of the HTTPResponse - that should give you the control that you want.

Don't forget that you could create the HTML you want just by creating computed fields and then saving as alpha to embed in an HTMLFORM.

T

Wouldn't all of this suggest there should be some documentation on the internals of the JavaScript and whatever else is used by HTML Composer? I am very annoyed that we have to figure all this out ourselves, then one minor upgrade later it all changes...

I'm kind of confused seeing all you virtuosi and experts transforming HTML to something else to use the result with AJAX, JQuery and (other) third-party products, as if that's an entirely normal thing to do. For starters, the HTML generated by WebFOCUS is hardly compliant to the XML standard (it's not xhtml, after all). Isn't that causing parsing errors?

Wouldn't this kind of thing be much easier to achieve if WebFOCUS would be able to produce reports in plain XML (using an XSD preferably, so that there's a known standard) or even JSON?

People obviously use this, why make it hard on them?

Or even better, maybe there's some way to extend the output formats that TABLE FILE can produce? If we can, for example, write a few Java-classes and get output the way we want to, that would be a good start I think. Although with XML and/or JSON output that would hardly be necessary.

(Regarding JSON, I think there's a new kid on the block that's very much like it, but which is supposedly better designed; Can't recall what it's called though)

quote:

Originally posted by Wep5622:
I'm kind of confused seeing all you virtuosi and experts transforming HTML to something else to use the result with AJAX, JQuery and (other) third-party products, as if that's an entirely normal thing to do. For starters, the HTML generated by WebFOCUS is hardly compliant to the XML standard (it's not xhtml, after all). Isn't that causing parsing errors?

Wouldn't this kind of thing be much easier to achieve if WebFOCUS would be able to produce reports in plain XML (using an XSD preferably, so that there's a known standard) or even JSON?

People obviously use this, why make it hard on them?

Or even better, maybe there's some way to extend the output formats that TABLE FILE can produce? If we can, for example, write a few Java-classes and get output the way we want to, that would be a good start I think. Although with XML and/or JSON output that would hardly be necessary.

I think the reality here is that people gravitate to what they know. It doesn't make it right, but it is completely understandable. If your application is suppose to be a very rich UI, then it kind of makes sense to look at WF to supply data. It provides access to data quite nicely. With a little bit of work, using common patterns, you can extend the web app quite nicely to fulfill that role. However, if I was building a fully functional app, then I wouldn't go down that road.

I don't feel that IB has any intension of deploying WF as the Model in a composite web app, and I'm not so sure they should either. They already have software that fits that role quite nicely ... iWay. An XSD can be easily generated, and iSM can easily transform the WF XML into any web standard that frameworks expect. It also does the routing and data marshaling that WF was not designed to do.

quote:

(Regarding JSON, I think there's a new kid on the block that's very much like it, but which is supposedly better designed; Can't recall what it's called though)

I believe you are referring to BSON ... something else that iSM can manage for you.

We do not document the internals because they are functions that we can change. If you use our internals and we change things, then your application will no longer work and you would not be very happy. In release 7702, we have surfaced a documented API of functions that can be called and are fully supported. If there are API functions you would like us to provide, new feature requests should be opened with Support Services.

quote:

I think the reality here is that people gravitate to what they know.

... And, often, (I see that) people criticize WebFOCUS due what they don’t know about WebFOCUS or trying to get WebFOCUS to do some which it was not designed to do. As David said

quote:

new feature requests should be opened with Support Services.

Have a Great Day Everybody

quote:

If you use our internals and we change things, then your application will no longer work and you would not be very happy

Unfortunately, this seems to happen even if we use only the GUI. I have had problems upgrading HTML Composer designed pages from v7.6.8 to v7.6.11.

Hi Tony,

I made the edits that you suggested. Thanks for pointing that out to me.

Hope all is well across the pond,

Norb

please do those edits, which Tony asked about, for your "Posted Fri Feb 04 2011 17:59 " post as well.

Thanks...

Hi Norb,

Yes, all is well thanks. Likewise, I hope 2011 sees good things for you.

T

PM on it's way.

Francis,

If you are experiencing upgrade issues, then you should please open cases with Support Services and give us a chance to review and resolve them.

Resolve them? Lol, I'd like to see you try.

Between 7.6.8 and 7.6.11 the entire concept of how an HTML page gets generated changed over to using AJAX. If you open an old (working) HTML page with the HTML-composer it "upgrades" the page to use the AJAX approach without asking. The result more often than not doesn't work out of the box if you make the mistake to save it.

It's a bit surprising your QA team didn't catch that one, but it's probably a bit late to try fixing it now.

I'm not dissatisfied with the result though (I don't know about Francis), but it's a change that was hardly backwards compatible. My humble opinion? It probably shouldn't have gone in a minor release.

But as I said, it's probably too late now. Of course, it is not too late to print a big red banner at the upgrade instructions pointing out the incompatibility.

Voila.

quote:

Of course, it is not too late to print a big red banner at the upgrade instructions pointing out the incompatibility.

Or a message (to the developer) to this point when it "upgrades" the page to use the AJAX approach. You Think? I'm think "Alert"...

I am a little late with the responses on this thread, but I need a Active report (that pages) to have check boxes. i want to pick/choose which rows to select to attach a note to the data rows. Without this functionality, the report is useless to my users. Why would this be so hard to do? I thought I found a way, but when you page, teh grid refreshes and you lose your previous array. Has anyone done this and I am tired of calling in to IBI to wait 3 weeks to be told it cannot be done!