In the distant past, a report was a sizeable fraction of a box of green striped, fanfold, lineprinter paper that arrived on your desk every day/week/month, some part of which you might look at.

Then came products such as the Genius User which enabled you to select those elements you wanted to see, when you wanted to see them, interactively.

Now in the 21st century you can not only create reports, you can broadcast the results for other chosen users on your Intranet, publish the results or dynamically interact with the results, further selecting, ordering, sorting the elements you want to see.

You can even publish the report program on your Intranet, allowing its use online with different parameters, (including list selection) to give up to the minute results to anyone, anywhere with suitable access. All these features are also available to Extranet and Internet users subject to suitable security.

Over the last year a number of significant enhancements have been made to the Genius User modules to improve the facilities available to users who have access to a web browser, whether on the Internet, on an Extranet or an Intranet.

A summary of these changes appears below and covers all enhancements since V2.4.12

To take advantage of these, please call the support desk to order your upgrade. (Either telephone +44 (0)20 8686 8045 or e-mail support@cristal.co.uk). Clients with a current maintenance and support contract are entitled to these enhancements free of charge. For others there will be a small upgrade fee.

To see a product overview of the Genius User Intranet facilities, please visit the Cristal Website at www.cristal.co.uk/frameset.htm and select the Platforms/Intranet tab.

There is a whole range of levels at which support has been added to the Genius User

• In Query, when a program is run interactively, HTML output may be produced and (on a suitable platform) viewed using the system's browser.
• When plotting interactively, the output choices now include ActiveX graphics and SVG
• When creating reports to disk, different FORMAT(OUTPUT) options allow for simple HTML output and dynamically browsable web pages
• Simple HTML output delivers the report as a series of linked pages, with a summary page which links to each data page and to each subtotal or final total in the report
• Dynamically browseable web pages enable not just browsing the report as written, but selecting detail lines by value, sorting the records, choosing what to display on the screen at the time.
• Genius User programs may be run on a webserver using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) with interactive prompts being delivered to the web browser, along with selection lists and resulting output including plots and pageprinter reports.
• Running a report program under a web server using CGI can return either immediate dynamic pages, or store the resulting pages on disk to be browsed through by others.
• Genius Documentation is now available in xHTML format
• infoGenius now produces reports in xHTML format
• Pageprint output now available as a web page
• Graphics output using ActiveX controls for use on a web page in Internet Explorer.
• Plot output using industry standard Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG), not only as a web page but for input to industry standard graphics and page layout engines such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.
• All generated web pages now comply with xHTML 1.0 standards, which means that they can be passed through suitable WAP gateways or other transformation engines.

In addition to this support for HTML, facilities are now available to create XML output, either using existing schema definitions (eg for input to BizTalk suites) or creating DTD or XML-XDR schema dynamically.

Using XML output it is possible to create reports with value dependant highlighting, using any of javascript, XSLT or ActiveX tabular data controls to process the data

In addition to these Genius User changes, the following important recent developments have been made to other products. More details are available on the website.

• Automatic pretotalling of values for forward reference of group summary values in reports.
• Faster (up to 10 times) access of report data using The Genius Linker/Oracle interface.
• Improved Genius Executive facilities, with different user levels, initial views, and faster drill down
• New metadata importers integrated with the Data Dictionary editor.
• Programmable screen and window dump/print facility.
• User controlled logging/display of run time error messages.
• Support for logical filenames on non-VMS platforms.
• Remote RMS file access, allowing direct access from non-VMS platforms.

For more information about upgrading to the latest version please contact the support desk.

If you do not want further product details sent by to you by e-mail, please reply to this address delete.e-letter@cristal.co.uk with any subject heading and body text.