Hi All,
OK, at the risk of being torn to pieces by all the progress veterans out there I have a bit of a bone to pick...
I am in the process of writing a report requiring many different levels of sub-totals and totals and am horrified at the lengths I have to go to to achieve this seemingly simple task. I never thought I'd say it but I wish I was developing this report in Access. I can't believe how bad accum and accumulate are to work with. When you have to go back to creating the running-totals yourself, and you have 5 different sub-totals/totals, 12 fields and 2 types of field (+ a total) - all of a sudden you've got 180 lines of code that have to be created by hand that just seem to be a waste to me. In access I could drag and drop the whole thing in a couple of minutes and would barely have to write code. If Progress want developers to take them seriously then why don't they give us some serious tools to work with? I have no problems with writing code, but when the code is boring and mundane I am wasting my time which could be better spent elsewhere.
If Progress has 4GL, why then should we need to rely on 3rd party tools like Crystal reports etc just to produce a decent report? What about CHUI based reports where there are no 3rd party tools to help you out (well none that I know of anyway).
I don't know about the rest of you people out there but I find that a large portion of my time is spent developing reports. So why isn't this made a lot simpler? I must confess, I am not that experienced a Progress programmer, but the more time I spend in Progress discovering its limitations, the more I know I don't want to become a specialist in Progress.
Other simple things like not being able to develop using dynamic queries before version 9... why? Don't they realise how much more powerful, and how much simpler life is with dynamic queries?
I'm currently using version 8.3, I don't know how much has improved by version 9 but I haven't read about any major revelations.
I think Progress need to start making things easier on the developers. Microsoft have the right idea - you make things easy for the developers and there will be a lot more software out there developed using your tools. To me, many aspects of Progress make me feel like I've been trapped in the early 90's when programming anything was a major ordeal.
Anyway, that was just my two cents worth.... if anyone could show me the light then that would be just great.
Rob
OK, at the risk of being torn to pieces by all the progress veterans out there I have a bit of a bone to pick...
I am in the process of writing a report requiring many different levels of sub-totals and totals and am horrified at the lengths I have to go to to achieve this seemingly simple task. I never thought I'd say it but I wish I was developing this report in Access. I can't believe how bad accum and accumulate are to work with. When you have to go back to creating the running-totals yourself, and you have 5 different sub-totals/totals, 12 fields and 2 types of field (+ a total) - all of a sudden you've got 180 lines of code that have to be created by hand that just seem to be a waste to me. In access I could drag and drop the whole thing in a couple of minutes and would barely have to write code. If Progress want developers to take them seriously then why don't they give us some serious tools to work with? I have no problems with writing code, but when the code is boring and mundane I am wasting my time which could be better spent elsewhere.
If Progress has 4GL, why then should we need to rely on 3rd party tools like Crystal reports etc just to produce a decent report? What about CHUI based reports where there are no 3rd party tools to help you out (well none that I know of anyway).
I don't know about the rest of you people out there but I find that a large portion of my time is spent developing reports. So why isn't this made a lot simpler? I must confess, I am not that experienced a Progress programmer, but the more time I spend in Progress discovering its limitations, the more I know I don't want to become a specialist in Progress.
Other simple things like not being able to develop using dynamic queries before version 9... why? Don't they realise how much more powerful, and how much simpler life is with dynamic queries?
I'm currently using version 8.3, I don't know how much has improved by version 9 but I haven't read about any major revelations.
I think Progress need to start making things easier on the developers. Microsoft have the right idea - you make things easy for the developers and there will be a lot more software out there developed using your tools. To me, many aspects of Progress make me feel like I've been trapped in the early 90's when programming anything was a major ordeal.
Anyway, that was just my two cents worth.... if anyone could show me the light then that would be just great.
Rob