Report Writers seamless integration to UDC and Data Dictionary?

[Eric Lehti]

Do you know any Report Writers that offer seamless integration to the F0005 UDC tables and Data Dictionary?

JDE's World Writer is excellent but offers INNER JOIN only. I would like to find a report writer capable of LEFT OUTER JOIN and EXCEPTION JOIN.
These are the report writers I am aware of right now.
1. Crystal Reports version 10.
2. What about B I Publisher: is it a report writer?
3. StarQuery from symtrax.com
4. a Report writer from JDETips.com (ERPTips.com)
Any others?

EricL 918-879-6036

 

[Jim_rubino]

There is Showcase from SPSS. It does the inner, left outer join and
exception joins. Marty Nelson does those all time for users here at
Fike. It can get a bit complicated though. I am not very good at using
Showcase. Marty and Dave McCune are though.

Jim Rubino
Fike Corporation

 

[SteveP]

F0005 is definitely more argumentative than most files.

I use AS400 Query to do the joins. I also created some SQL logical views to get around the limitations. You can build the join type into the logical, then use WW against that logical file.

There is also MS Access which I do not use too much any more but has tons of features. I found the ODBC connectivity awkward but an IT pro could probably set it up better than I had it.

 

[mgerritt]

Eric, I looked extensively at report writers last year, and ended up not acquiring any. It may have been a matter of what I wanted to report against, mostly sales. I recall I needed 32 joins to get all the data I wanted for one report. With that requirement, the performance of the SQL based report writers, Starquery and HelpSystems Sequel were not satisfactory. I've come to the conclusion that, at least for what I want, a Data Warehouse is really needed to report against World. The data needs to be denormalized before letting anyone try to build reports. RapidDecision looked promising. Problem is, the Data Warehouse solutions are pricy.