Hi All! Im not new to WebFocus or App Studio at all, but HO...

[Tracy Rue]

Hi All!

Im not new to WebFocus or App Studio at all, but HOLD files are something I have been very late to the game with. I have plenty of in-use HOLD file fexs to look over for reference, however Im looking for actual documentation or tutorials on how to make HOLD files starting in App Studio. I have looked through the KnowledgeBase, searched MyIbi, watched YouTube videos from IB I come up with very specific problems and solutions vs training.

Can anyone point me in the direction of starter material

[Michael Williams 11]

I dont think any of the documents depict the actual GUI path, but if I recall correctly its just choosing your output format, you can select FOCUS/XFOCUS formats choose the AS name and either save it in your folder path or just use something like FOCCACHE to just have it temporary for the procedure. (advanced apologies as its been a few years since Ive been in App Studio and usually did most of my work through using Text as opposed to the GUI).

[David Beagan]

Are you looking for something like this to get started

Creating Reports With WebFOCUS Language Release 8.2 Version 04

(Saving and Reusing Your Report Output - page 471)

[Tracy Rue]

Yes, David! Section 8 of this manual is perfect. Thank you so much for the link.

[Manoj Chaurasia]

Hi Tracy

Welcome to myibi

The document that David has pointed you to is an excellent document for the hows and all the different options. I would like to add my 2 cents to this as a lot depends on why you will be creating a HOLD file. There are many use cases for using HOLD files. Sometimes a report requires more than one pass of the data to get the results formatted so the end report can reflect the data properly so in that case the output format of the HOLD file can be just about anything as you will be just taking the results and massaging the data for the final output. Many times a HOLD file will be saved and re-used on a scheduled basis so it can be summarized once and reported against many times. In this case you may want to use FOCUS or XFOCUS because you can take advantage of setting indexes on specific fields to make WHERE conditions perform better. Another use case for these types of HOLD files is to use them for drop downs in HTML pages to make those perform better. When you create these kind of HOLD files you need to specify the APP HOLD command to tell it which application folder to store the results in and then use ReportCaster to schedule the fex that creates these file on whatever basis it needs to be refreshed. Using APP HOLD should only be used for HOLD files you want to save permanently somewhere not for the first use case where a secondary pass of the data is required otherwise in a multi user environment each user would be constantly overwriting this info and causing bad results. The third use case that comes to mind is when you need to create a HOLD file that is going to be joined back to a relational table for additional processing, in this case I have found that using SAME_DB for the output format makes the processing much faster than joining two different types of files. This requires that the ID used in the adapter connection has the ability to create temporary tables in the relational database. Im sure there are other uses cases but these are the ones I have used the most and others can chime in on their experiences. I hope this additional information is helpful.

[Tracy Rue]

Thanks Chuck,

Yes, the vast majority of the time we use HOLD files for a second pass at the data. However Im just starting there - with fex already in use - and will be utilizing it much more in the future. So your further comments are helpful as well.

Gracias!