Newsgroups: geac.ml.advenh Subject: Re: GEN - Utility to Produce HTML Pages Date: 6 Dec 1996 15:12:26 -0500 Organization: Geac Canada Limited Lines: 52 Distribution: geac Message-ID: <589una$sa4@sam.ca.geac.com> References: <961206005327.23007@geac.com> In article <961206005327.23007@geac.com>, Valerie Bross wrote: >I agree that the report writer could be used to extract data; and >also agree that the mechanical chore of adding HTML markup & >metatags remains. This chore would have to be completed for >each report, and would have to be re-done every time the page >was generated. So, it is not surprising that people have not >swamped ADVANC-L with discussions of how they are using ADVANCE >to generate home pages. You can use the report writer at 6.5 and up to "automatically" generate web pages once you've set them up... Step 1: Make a symbolic link within your public_html directory to your &HOLD& file (ln -s /yourpath/ADV/\&HOLD\& advreports) Step 2: "Route output to" a named &HOLD& file (i.e. Hwebtest) Step 3: Run the report (without further modification!) Step 4: Browse to http://www.yoursite.edu/advreports/webtest If you would like to add tags (like links) to the report... change: "<>" to: "Web Test
<>"
   (or something similar, including  and ).

Make sure you change the &HOLD& item name to have the extension .html

You can then generate links using an I-descripter with line two like:
'' : LINK.NAME.DICT.ITEM : ''

One popular tag that is a problem is  - these will not display
without 
 and hold file pages are set to have 32k page length (to
avoid page breaks), so you shouldn't use FOOTER to get a . You
can create a table within each report line, but unless you specify the
width of each cell, you won't get a consistent look.

If you wanted to get away from the 
 formatted look, you can either
create separate I-descripters with tags in them and compose your
html when you compose your report, or you can use I-descriptors to modify
each specially formatted item, like the link example above.  You may
also wish to use COL.HDR.SUPP and replace the <
> with your own
html code (including links and images - just watch those quotes) to give
your page a completely custom look.

Once you have your page generated, there are a number of utilities that
can be used to validate the links on your page (which would help with
your other html enhancement request).

Ross Morrissey
Geac ADVANCE Product Support