WebFOCUS Blogs

Dear Professionals, I started writing this blog more than a year ago. The purpose of this blog was to help the people with day to day coding in WebFOCUS. I also use the codes for my reference as well. Whenever I put some effort to resolve a problem or find some solution, and I feel it could be used in future also either by myself or it can benefit to others, I share it on this blog. As we all know feedback is always a good motivation. I request all of you to please share your feedback/ suggestions on the same if you have any. If you want me to share on some specific topic or some common issue. Is it really helping you? If not? What else we can do to make it helpful? If you have something to share, send it to my mail id er.pravin007@gmail.com. I'll publish it over there with your name as presenter. I long run, this can become a place where you can find code for most of your day to day solutions. In last 6-8 months, I started liking WebFOCUS 8 version (initially I found it h...

Almost all reports (including WebFOCUS) usually need to show Report Run Date and Time. WebFOCUS provides us the variables &DATE and &TOD(system variables) to get system date and time and use it in our report without calculating anything in the procedure. However in some of the report we need to show time stamp in a.m./p.m. format. I have created the logic and I feel that sharing it might save some hours of development time for developers looking for such requirement. Below is the piece of code you can put in your procedure and you can use &TOD2 in your report header. -SET &M=''; -SET &H1 = EDIT(&TOD,'99'); -SET &H2 = IF &H1 GT 12 THEN &H1 - 12 ELSE &H1; -SET &M = IF &H1 GT 12 THEN ' PM' ELSE ' AM'; -SET &TOD2 = &H2 | EDIT(&TOD,'$$$:99$') | EDIT(&TOD,'$$$:$$$99') | &M; -TYPE &TOD -TYPE &TOD2 Please share your thoughts/ feedback's.  Happy coding ...

I have come across the situation many a times where we need to filter report data for: 1) 6 months prior to selected/system date. 2) Report should pull data for date greater than last 30 days. 3) Any other situation where you need 30 days prior, 1 year future date, 3 months after date from system date etc. I feel it is worth sharing the below piece of code: -SET &DATEINPUT = EDIT('&DATEYYMD.EVAL','9999$$$$$$')||EDIT('&DATEYYMD.EVAL','$$$$$99$$$')||EDIT('&DATEYYMD.EVAL','$$$$$$$$99'); -TYPE &DATEINPUT -SET &DATE_30 = DATECVT((DATEADD((DATECVT(&DATEINPUT, 'I8YYMD', 'YYMD')), 'D', -30 )), 'YYMD', 'I8YYMD'); -TYPE IN: &DATEINPUT / OUT: &DATE_30 In above example, I calculated date which is 30 days prior to currect date. In place of 'D', we can have 'M', 'Y' and 'BD' for Months, Year and Business days. If you need to calcula...

WebFOCUS has lots of flexibility because it has option to write code in text editor. That is very unique feature in WebFOCUS which separates it from other reporting tools. There are certain occasions where we put lots of effort to achieve certain requirement in our report. But if you know the keywords, it can be done in minutes. Recently one of my colleague came to me asking for the solution to display leading zeroes in the report. He spent almost 3-4 hours and still continued. The requirement was to display 0.00 instead of .00. The solution was pretty simple. You need to write below code at start of your fex file: SET CENT-ZERO = ON It was very easy to do it but very difficult to find out the keyword. If you have to suppress leading zeroes it should be turned off. SET CENT-ZERO = OFF I thought it is worth sharing as it can save some time for your during coding. Please share your thoughts/ feedback's. Happy coding in WebFOCUS!!!!

Many times while working on the projects, we face some small issues which takes a long time to fix it or achieve the requirement even if it looks very small. For example concatenation of 2 columns seperated by a '-' and it should contain 1 space between '-' and second column. It looks very small but when I tried to do that, it took me a long time to find out a very simple solution. There are many example like that. I want to share such things with you which I faced in my day to day coding. Concatenation with space:   You can either do it in define or compute as given below: COUNTRY_CAR/A50=CAR||(' - ' |COUNTRY); User defined function in WebFOCUS:  If we need to perform repeative set of statements again and again, user defined funtion is a very good approach. Below is a simple example of function ADDNO to add 2 numbers and return the output: DEFINE FUNCTION ADDNO(NO1/D20.2, NO2/D20.2) ADDNO/D20.2 = NO1+NO2; END -RUN TABLE FILE CAR PRINT COUNTRY ...

We do create lot many report and many of them do have Subtotals and Grand total. Subtotals are mainly required in Sales, finance & accounting and in most of the reports where there are more factual data in the report. Surprisingly we always gets confused about the difference between SUB-TOTAL and SUBTOTAL & SUMMARIZE and RECOMPUTE. Now lets see what is the differences in between these: SUB-TOTAL and SUBTOTAL: 1) You can use the SUBTOTAL and SUB-TOTAL commands to sum individual values, such as columns of numbers, each time a named sort field changes value.  2) SUB-TOTAL displays a subtotal for all numeric values when the sort field changes value, and for any higher-level sort fields when their values change.  3) SUBTOTAL displays a subtotal only when the specified sort field changes value. It does not give subtotals for higher-level fields.  4) Both SUB-TOTAL and SUBTOTAL produce grand totals. You can suppress grand totals using the NOTOTAL command.   ...

Some times while creating a graph using web focus code we face problems in formatting the graph. For example – graph title, Font size, font name, Y-axis title, legend position, label rotation etc. To save the time in searching these things the below codes will be very useful. We just need to set the values as we want in the graph in set_values.fex and we can include the  set_values.fex  file to the fex file in our code before GRAPH FILE FILENAME command. And second fex reuse.fex we need to include after ON GRAPH SET GRAPHSTYLE * command (you can also put the reuse.fex codes to reuse.sty and include it at the same position). Code for set_values.fex: -*Set the value for the graph Title -DEFAULT &GRAPH_NAME='XYZ'; -*Set the value for X-axis Title -DEFAULT &O1_TITLE='ABC'; -*Set the value for Y1-Axis title -DEFAULT &Y1_TITLE='ABC'; -*Set the font Name for X-axis -DEFAULT &O1_label_n='Arial'; -*Set the font Size for X-...