Hi. I am relatively new to Informix. I am curious to know what options you are aware of or are using for creating reports from 4GL. We run Ifx 7.32 on AIX 5.3.
We create a variety of reports for our different departments. Packing slips, sales reports, invoices, etc. Currently, we have a custom solution in place that is quickly becoming outdated. The report drivers within a 4GL program will pump out the data for a printed report along with our own proprietary tags to delimit the data. Once this file is written to disk, we call a Perl script to merge this file with a report template that has the formatting and page layout as raw PCL data. The problem is that the tool we use to create the document templates is very old. I have been tasked with evaluating alternatives.
Is there a standard practice for generating these kinds of documents from a 4GL program? I would appreciate any and all feedback. What do you use? What tools should I look at?