S/Merge

S/Merge

Where usefulness and name originality are inversely proportional

One of our users recently had the task of moving lots of their existing AREV MERGE routines to OpenInsight and balked at the idea of recoding them in OIPI – they worked after all so why bother? We hit upon the idea of rewriting MERGE in OI and in so doing we managed to get several other useful techniques sorted!

Anyway firstly let’s look at what S/Merge is… for those of you who don’t come from an AREV background, Merge was a reporting tool that what it lacked in user friendliness made up in flexibility. It wasn’t WYSIWYG by any means but once mastered it was a very useful tool. It was designed to create reports of a mail merge variety but it dealt with multivalues much more successfully than other tools.

S/Merge is an OI replacement for MERGE, it doesn’t really improve on the original at all (although we’re open to suggestions for the next release) but it allows existing merge reports to be used in OI. As with S/List it is designed with the developer in mind. Unlike S/List it is not anticipated to be a suitable end user tool and it is therefore priced accordingly. Licensing is similar to S/List – you may deploy as many S/Merge reports as you want free of charge, but the moment the user has input into the process a developer license is required.

S/Merge is made up of three primary components – namely:

	The S/Merge Import Wizard – brings existing MERGE reports into OI
	The S/Merge processor – responsible for actually creating the S/Merge reports
	The S/Merge window – allows developers to modify or add S/Merge reports.

Let’s look at these in turn.

The S/Merge Import Wizard

To assist people with existing Merges we provide the S/Merge Import Wizard. It is launched by shift-double clicking SMERGE_IMPORT_WIZ or typing EXEC SMERGE_IMPORT_WIZ from the system monitor.

selecting the location of the file the merges are in

whereupon the wizard finds the reports and imports them

and they are now available for use.

The S/Merge Processor

The S/MERGE subroutine can be called directly by the programmer and takes the following parameters

MergeId	Name of the merge definition record stored in the SYSREPOSREPORTS table
MergeKeys	@fm delimited list of keys to use for the merge. Passing null forces the processor to use an active select list if one is available, otherwise the entire file is selected.
MergeOptions	A string representing various options: "S" : Merge to screen ( the default ) "P": Merge to the windows default printer
TestRunAmount	An optional number of rows to output in a test run.

sMerge (mergeID, mergeKeys, mergeOptions, TestRunAmount )

The S/Merge Window

Launching the S/MERGE window by shift-double licking on the S/MERGE Window Executable or by EXECing S/MERGE loads the S/Merge Window as follows :-

Deleted: dblclking

from here you can select an existing Merge report to edit

the script is on tab 2

A right click context menu exposes the traditional formatting commands

and of course the ability to perform a test merge

or create a new report by typing the name in and filling in the prompts. (Standard dimensions default in automatically)