Using This Guide

Initial sections of this guide teach the basic uses of SQR. You learn how to:

Create a variety of reports, such as tabular, cross-tabular, and master and detail reports.
Produce mailing labels, form letters, and envelopes.
Enhance your reports with typeset-quality fonts and graphics.
Produce graphs and charts that help you present data and trends visually.

Subsequent sections describe the advanced features and uses of SQR. You learn how to:

Create HTML output and publish reports on the internet, an intranet, or an extranet.
Create reports that can be easily ported between different systems and databases and that support different printer and display types.
Create reports that format dates, numbers, and money according to local preferences.
Integrate SQR with other software packages, such as front-end user interface tools and spreadsheets.
Extend SQR with procedures and functions that are written in C.
Test and debug programs.
Tune programs for optimum performance.

The code examples demonstrate standard SQR programming style. Use this standard style to make your code easier for other SQR programmers to understand.

You can run the program examples in this guide without modification against the Oracle database, and you can run them against other databases with minor modifications.

Audience

This guide was written for programmers who develop reports for relational databases. To use this guide effectively, you need a working knowledge of SQL and experience writing software programs. You also must be familiar with your particular database and operating system.

How to Use SQR for PeopleSoft Developers

You can just read this book and study the sample programs. However, Oracle encourages you to try these programs for yourself and to experiment with them. Make some changes to the sample programs and see how they run.

To use the sample programs, you must first install SQR for PeopleSoft. SQR for PeopleSoft installs automatically when you install PeopleTools.

If you installed all of the program components, the sample programs are located in the TUTORIAL directory underneath <PS_HOME>\bin\sqr\<database_platform>.

You can run the sample programs on any hardware platform, but you may find it easier to review SQR program results from the Microsoft Windows platform by using the SQR Viewer or a web browser to verify your results.

Note: You can set up the sample database and run the sample programs with any username and password, although you may want to use an account that does not hold important data.

Syntax Conventions

Syntax and code examples use the following conventions:

Convention	Description
{ }	Braces enclose required items.
[ ]	Square brackets enclose optional items.
...	Ellipses indicate that the preceding parameter can be repeated.
\|	A vertical bar separates alternatives within brackets, braces, or parentheses.
'	A single quote starts and ends a literal text constant or any argument that has more than one word. Important! If you are copying code directly from the examples in the PDF file, make sure that you change the slanted quotes to regular quotes; otherwise, you will receive an error message.
,	A comma separates multiple arguments.
( )	Parentheses must enclose an argument or element.
UPPERCASE	SQR commands and arguments are uppercase within the text but lowercase in the code examples. (Note that these commands are not case-sensitive.)
`Variable`	Information and values that you must supply appear in `variable` style.
hyphen versus underscore	Many SQR commands, such as BEGIN-PROGRAM, use a hyphen, whereas procedure and variable names use an underscore. Procedure and variable names can contain either a hyphen or underscores, but using underscores in procedure and variable names to distinguish them from SQR commands is best. It also prevents confusion when you mix variable names and numbers in an expression, where hyphens could be mistaken for minus signs.

Using This Guide

Audience

How to Use SQR for PeopleSoft Developers

Related Documents

Syntax Conventions