REPORT syntax and behavior

FINISH REPORT is mandatory to get output

With IBM® Informix® 4GL, even when the FINISH REPORT instruction is not used, the report engine produces some output.

To handle report output correctly, Genero BDL needs to know if the report is finished or if more rows will be printed. Therefore, the FINISH REPORT instruction is mandatory with FGL, in order to get a report output.

Fix the code and properly end the report with FINISH REPORT.

BEFORE/AFTER GROUP OF ignores trailing blanks

With IBM Informix 4GL RDS (fglpc/fglgo), trailing blanks are significant when present in a VARCHAR variable used by a BEFORE GROUP OF or AFTER GROUP OF clause in a REPORT routine.

For example, the value "ABC__" (here the spaces are represented with an underscore) and "ABC_" or "ABC" are considered different with I4GL BEFORE/AFTER GROUP OF, while Genero BDL considers these values as equal and group the report rows consequently.

The Genero BDL behavior is consistent with other character string comparison areas, like when using a VARCHAR variable in an IF statement.

Note that CHAR variables are always blank-padded. Consequently, it's not possible to have a different number of trailing spaces.

Report SUM/AVG when using MONEY

With IBM Informix 4GL, in a REPORT routine, when using the SUM or AVG aggregate functions with a variable of type MONEY, the resulting type remains a MONEY, and the currency symbols defined by DBMONEY is used in the output.

With Genero BDL, the result type for SUM or AVG is always a DECIMAL, and the currency symbol is not used to format the result. The precision of the result type depends on how often the report routine has been called. To get a predictable result, format the result of those aggregate functions with a USING clause.

Using string expression in COLUMN operator

With IBM Informix 4GL, when using WHENEVER ANY ERROR, if a PRINT instruction uses the COLUMN operator to shift forward the output position, if the expression passed as argument is not a valid integer number, I4GL produces a runtime error -1213 "A character to numeric conversion process failed".

Genero BDL does not produce this error when using WHENEVER ANY ERROR. The expression evaluates to NULL and no space characters are produced by the COLUMN operator.

Note that in the context of WHENEVER ERROR, the behavior of I4GL and Genero BDL is identical in this case.

Fix the code in order to use a valid INTEGER variable for COLUMN arguments.

The FGLSKIPNXTPG environment variable

With IBM Informix 4GL, the FGLSKIPNXTPG environment variable can be used to control the behavior of the report engine. Since I4GL 4.1, the SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE command has no effect when a report is already at the top of the page (that is, when no data has yet been sent to a new page). To get the older behavior of SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE can override this effect using the environment variable FGLSKIPNXTPG.

Genero BDL implements the new I4GL 4.1 behavior, but there is not way to get the former behavior as when setting the FGLSKIPNXTPG environment variable with I4GL.