INTRODUCTION The Extensible Report Generator (ERG) is a set of perl object modules that lets a user quickly develop object classes which can produce highly configurable reports with a minimal amount of development effort. The report generator class can easily be extended to produce summary information besides just formatting data and field headings. Here's an example of a very simple report produce by the report generators, including the field headings and the summary lines. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Directory Modify time Access docs 05/27/98 19:03:06 05/27/98 freezer 05/27/98 14:33:34 05/27/98 File Size Modify time Access dirhelp.vtxt 1,383 05/27/98 09:26:42 06/03/98 file_reporter.pm 6,366 06/03/98 10:38:58 06/03/98 line_formatter.pm 11,680 06/03/98 10:17:04 06/03/98 old_test.pl 3,258 05/27/98 19:00:06 06/03/98 page_manager.pm 9,719 06/03/98 10:33:20 06/03/98 report_generator.pm 25,540 06/03/98 10:16:42 06/03/98 report_summary.pm 6,821 06/03/98 10:20:04 06/03/98 test.pl 2,468 06/03/98 10:50:18 06/03/98 zzz 513 05/27/98 10:31:02 06/03/98 Total 67,748 Average 7,528 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- STRUCTURE The ERG consists of 4 class objects. The line formatter class is used by the report generator class to format lines and by the page manager class to format headers and trailers for each page. The report generator class can produce three types of output: lines with field data, lines with field headings or lines with summary information. The report summary class is used by the report generator class to keep track of information for report summaries, e.g. totals, averages. The page manage class can be used to break report lines into pages. GETTING STARTED The over-all structure is pretty easy to understand. The quickest way to get started is to look at the file 'test.pl' which is a demo of using the report generators and the file 'file_reporter' which is an example for extending the basic report generator class. Comments of the beginning of each of the 4 basic class files can help explain more about how to extend the classes. The simplest way to use this module is just to copy the four class files into the working directory. (The standard Makefile.pl is also provided.) LIST OF FILES INCLUDED: README - this file MANIFEST - list of files Changes - list of changes Makefile.pl - make file generator erg_line_formatter.pm - line formatter class erg_report_generator.pm - basic report generator class erg_report_summary.pm - report summary class erg_page_manager.pm - page manager class test.pl - test/demo file file_reporter.pm - file reporter class used by test.pl Version: 1.13 Date: 7/25/98 s. luebking phoenixl@aol.com ############################# Copyright ####################################### # Copyright (c) 1998 Scott Luebking. All rights reserved. # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or # modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. ###############################################################################