New to Powerhouse

[Darren Reely]

Hi Matthew,

The little I know of E.D.I. (Electronic Data Interchange) is that it 
really is just a transport exchange engine. They can't do complicated 
editing checking, so what ever tool you use will have to be easy to 
maintain for that important edit checking phase.

You can use any of the Powerhouse tools for export and QTP and QDesign 
for import. To read the data in, you'd have to declare a fixed width 
file in the Powerhouse dictionary. It's been eons since I've worked with 
such files.

The easiest export tool is the report writer Quiz, but it has length 
limits and no edit checking. Although depending on your needs, it may 
work. You can output fixed size columns or delimited via some trickery 
already mentioned. I have some 'reports' that get used by Excel, so I 
concatenate all the data columns with tabs between them.

Next is the transaction batch processing tool QTP. It has limited edit 
checking and as far as I know, no length limits of concern. If needed 
you could write to an exception file for both the output and the input 
phases. With this tool you could create and read fixed width data. For a 
newbie this may be a little difficult to learn because of the different 
thinking process. Once you get the hang of it, it is quite cool.

To do very complicated requests with Quiz and QTP often requires 
thinking differently and performing muliple passes through your data. 
That is a little difficult to explain here. Search for multiple ACCESS 
statements in those types of files and you'll likely find out what I'm 
referring to.

Finally as a hack, QDesign (the screen tool) can be used in batch (I'm 
assuming your wanting to cron the jobs) mode to do some complicated 
processing. Download the archives for notes a batch processing via Quick 
screens.

If I was forced to pick one of the above, it would be QDesign. The 
reason is you have nearly full 3GL like coding ability, which means 
greater flexibility. Even to hang your self a bit. Yes, I would try to 
keep within the 4GL logic, but keeping the data honest is critical.

Now after writing all of that, I suspect your ODBC idea is a good 
solution for you. That is where your expertise is and I think you'll 
need such a flexible tool for complicated edit checks. If performance 
over the network becomes an issue, then you may consider one of the 
above solutions to work with intermediate files.

As usual, YMMV.

Good luck.

Darren


Matthew Cox wrote:
> Hello All,
> 	I'm new to Powerhouse and this list. We are running Powerhouse 8.13 on an
> SCO Unix box with C-ISAM files for the data. I have a project I've been
> asked to complete and I'm trying to decide on the best way to proceed. I'm
> hoping that you Powerhouse experts can help with some suggestions. I need to
> import data into and export data out of the C-ISAM files to be shared with
> another application running on a Windows Server. (Anyone familiar with
> E.D.I.?) I consider myself to be a very good VB programmer but a complete
> novice with Powerhouse. My question is what do you consider to be the best
> way to accomplish this task? My experience leads me to consider a VB
> application running on the Windows server using an ODBC connection to push
> and pull the data I need.
> 
> Has anyone else tried this and if so what ODBC driver did you use?
> 
> What kind of import/export options do I have in Powerhouse?
> 
> 
> Thanks
> Matt Cox
> 
> 
>