bknox @t uaex.edu Oracle Database Programmer/Analyst
Answering the frequent question: Which Tools to use with Banner?
News:
is a Google Custom Search for my documents and presentations on Banner
Reporting Solutions.
My public and professional life has been dominated by technical projects, most
of which have included computer programming or the management of computing
projects. This site joins most of them together:
Oracle SQL*Plus and UNIX Reporting, Evisions'
Argos, Ad Hoc Reporting, MS
Access Reporting, Oracle Application Express Notes and Projects.
Banner Reporting makes up a large part of my current job.
Reporting today is done in many different ways. While this may still include
traditional paper reports or archived report images of them, increasingly,
reporting is moving away from these formats.
A report today may be little more than the Subject of an email or a single
screen of information. Finally, long after promised, the industry is moving to
exception reporting which has started to replace many traditional reports.
“Which Reporting Tools to use with Banner?” is perhaps the most Frequently Asked
Question posed on the SunGardHE (a.k.a., SCT) Banner Listserv.
SQL*Plus is our
preferred tool for Programmer created reports or processes. SQL*Plus is the
command-line interface to Oracle and therefore is available to every Banner
site. It provides fast interactive development, the ability to readily format
and paginate, and PL/SQL is always available from SQL*Plus if needed.
Other than being required for some Banner provided code, COBOL is most useful
for generating reports with complex totals or control break logic. There is
nothing wrong with this enduring language other than the fact that it is not
free and few new programmers are learning the language. COBOL is compiled and
SQL Code run in COBOL is much faster than the same code run in SQL*Plus. All
the problems associated with developing in a compiled language are still with
COBOL, as are the advantages.
For Banner Reporting, C is about the same as COBOL without the extensive formatting capabilities that are a built-in part of COBOL. C's greatest advantage is that most new programmers have been introduced to it.
My Oracle programming is still mostly from command line using SQL*Plus. SQL*Plus is powerful, easy to use and to extend. For most of us, the key to rapid development in any language is a repository of working code.
For example, today I "coded" a rather complex new report in about ten minutes using a report program generator that I wrote once and have used dozens of times to save hundreds of hours of writing the same basic report code again and again. In ten seconds, I had the report structure done. Report headings, footers, pages numbered, primary in-code documentation completed. I grabbed an organization directory table I had previously built to model our management structure, added an In-Line View created for another task giving us our state budgeting job titles from SunGard Higher Education's Banner database and it was all done but making it pretty.
But, the real promise of database systems is giving non-IT
end users powerful Ad Hoc reporting. A promise that has been very hard to
realize until recently.
BannerAccess is a collection of Predefined SQL Pass-Through
Queries connecting MS Access to
SunGard Higher
Education's Banner (Oracle) Database product. We have successfully used
BannerAccess for over nine years. Now we are moving to replace the MS Access
part of this tool with
Evisions'
Argos, a web based Ad hoc reporting tool.
I developed BannerAccess to give a simple to use Ad Hoc reporting tool to our
functional end-users of Banner. This tool used pre-defined Queries to make
Banner Tables appear less daunting as well as making them easier to combine into
more complex reporting objects. BannerAccess uses SQL Pass-Through Queries to
make efficient use of the underlying Oracle database in Banner. BannerAccess is
easy to use right up to the point of needing real parameters in a Pass-Through
Query. At that point one must use Visual Basic to code the parameter logic that
would make the Query run efficiently. And, that is its major shortcoming: many
functional users are very unlikely to ever write this Visual Basic code.
BannerArgos
is my newest major programming tools project. Using Argos instead of MS Access
will enable BannerArgos to easily surpass BannerAccess in most areas. Creating
parameter based Queries in Argos are simple and I believe our functional users
will make good use of them. Argos is a product that will find be easier to
support, faster, and more secure than MS Access. The product has features that
both end-users and programmer will find useful.
Argos Presentations:
Admin and Security
MS Access Conversion
Moving into the
Community
ePrint is a SunGardHE product that is frequently used by Banner sites. e~Print was the old name; ePrint is the new name. (But, not e-Print.)
ePrint is a secure, web-based, report server. It runs on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise) and is most often completely supported by the SunGardHE ePrint group. You can do the Linux maintenance yourself if you want, but SunGard does a very good job of support for ePrint and support is bundled into the product's annual maintenance.
IMO, ePrint works best for plain text reports which be secured by Fund/Orgn (a.k.a., Banner Security) with individual pages served to the users. The served plain text pages are displayed as PDF or Text. The PDF file display gives the user the ability to print from their PC without the server knowing the Printer being used.
While one can store html, pdf, or many other file types in ePrint, these lose the Fund/Orgn security by page.
We use ftp to send reports from our Banner server to the ePrint server. (Both servers are inside the our FireWall; sftp could be used if needed.) We refresh our "Daily" reports every hour from a cron run script on the Banner server (AIX).
ePrint does not run Oracle, so the usual SunGard reluctance to keep Linux current for Oracle servers is not a factor. We just (spring 2009) replaced our original ePrint server which had run without issues for over five years. The ePrint folks had been urging us to move to RH 5 for months.
The replacement was done remotely after we locally
installed Red Hat 5.3 (about 40 minutes once you have the huge downloaded image
from Red Hat).
SunGard requires that we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the OS. Be sure to
get the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Academic Server Edition which has a very
serious discount for education. This version is unsupported by Red Hat, but for
ePrint your OS support is already bundled into the ePrint annual maintenance.
You download the ico file and burn it to a DVD. ePrint provides step by step
instructions for how they want the server to be installed.
The ePrint folks moved the old box' data files, switched our new box's name and
IP to the old. Our only problem was with the new Dell box requiring a F1 to
continue to boot (strange option for a box sold as a server). It has been
running without incident for months.
ePrint Presentations
Summit 2006 - ePrint Innovative ways we use it (ABUG
version)
Wiki Notes were collected from representative Wiki
systems to serve as a model for use by Extension.
Banner Reporting Sites:
Calvin Deiterich's
Argos Reporting
Zach Heath's
Banner Reporting
Blog
This is a personal site maintained by Bruce Knox ( bknox at uaex.edu ) documenting University of Arkansas, Division of Agriculture, Cooperative Extension Service IT projects. It is oriented to Oracle Reporting Solutions in the context of generating bespoken reports from SunGard Higher Education's Banner product.
Disclaimer
Use this information and these scripts at your own risk. As
a condition of using these scripts and information from this site, you agree
to hold harmless both the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension
Service and Bruce Knox for any problems that they may cause or other
situations that may arise from their use, and that neither the Extension
Service nor I will be held liable for those consequences. The scripts and
information are provided "as is" without warranty, implied or otherwise.
Limitation of liability will be the amount paid to the University of
Arkansas specifically for this information. (It was free:)
Any University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture website Disclaimer terms
found in conflict with terms of this disclaimer shall over ride and replace
the conflicting terms found herein.
Other personal pages/sites that I maintain:
http://www.openMosix.org the website for the
openMosix
(Open Source) Project hosted on
.
Note: The openMosix Project officially
closed March 1, 2008. The source code and mail lists archives will
continue to be available on SourceForge as reference materials.
Archive Links are: FAQ
HowTo
Wiki
SourceForge
Most of the works of art used on my pages and presentations, other than
the Extension banner and Spot Logo, are used by permission of
J. Wilson
Spence.
My personal work site is http://www.uaex.edu/bknox.
My personal site is
http://betwinx.com.
Copyright 2009, 2010 Bruce
Knox
|
Extension is moving to Luminis Content Management System
soon and our move will orphan many of my old URL addresses. The
following will provide a crosswalk to the missing files. These
include:
Disclaimer
Use this
information and these scripts at your own risk.
As a
condition of using these scripts and information from this site, you
agree to hold harmless both the University of Arkansas Cooperative
Extension Service and Bruce Knox for any problems that they may cause
or other situations that may arise from their use, and that neither the
Extension Service nor I will be held liable for those consequences.
The scripts and information are provided "as is" without
warranty, implied or otherwise.
Limitation of liability will be the amount paid to the
University of Arkansas specifically for this information. (It was
free:) |
||