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INTRODUCTION

The Extensible Report Generator (ERG) is a set of perl object modules
that lets a user quickly develop object classes which can produce
highly configurable reports with a minimal amount of development
effort.  The report generator class can easily be extended to produce
summary information besides just formatting data and field headings.

Here's an example of a very simple report produce by the report
generators, including the field headings and the summary lines.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Directory                       Modify time           Access

docs                            05/27/98 19:03:06     05/27/98
freezer                         05/27/98 14:33:34     05/27/98


File                     Size   Modify time           Access

dirhelp.vtxt            1,383   05/27/98 09:26:42     06/03/98
file_reporter.pm        6,366   06/03/98 10:38:58     06/03/98
line_formatter.pm      11,680   06/03/98 10:17:04     06/03/98
old_test.pl             3,258   05/27/98 19:00:06     06/03/98
page_manager.pm         9,719   06/03/98 10:33:20     06/03/98
report_generator.pm    25,540   06/03/98 10:16:42     06/03/98
report_summary.pm       6,821   06/03/98 10:20:04     06/03/98
test.pl                 2,468   06/03/98 10:50:18     06/03/98
zzz                       513   05/27/98 10:31:02     06/03/98

Total                  67,748

Average                 7,528
----------------------------------------------------------------------


STRUCTURE

The ERG consists of 4 class objects.  The line formatter class is used
by the report generator class to format lines and by the page manager
class to format headers and trailers for each page.  The report
generator class can produce three types of output:  lines with field
data, lines with field headings or lines with summary information.
The report summary class is used by the report generator class to keep track
of information for report summaries, e.g. totals, averages.
The page manage class can be used to break report lines into pages.



GETTING STARTED

The over-all structure is pretty easy to understand.  The quickest
way to get started is to look at the file 'test.pl' which is a
demo of using the report generators and the file 'file_reporter'
which is an example for extending the basic report generator
class.  Comments of the beginning of each of the 4 basic class files
can help explain more about how to extend the classes.

The simplest way to use this module is just to copy the four class files
into the working directory.  (The standard Makefile.pl is also provided.)


LIST OF FILES INCLUDED:

    README	             -  this file
    MANIFEST                 -  list of files
    Changes                  -  list of changes
    Makefile.pl              -  make file generator

    erg_line_formatter.pm    -  line formatter class
    erg_report_generator.pm  -  basic report generator class
    erg_report_summary.pm    -  report summary class
    erg_page_manager.pm      -  page manager class

    test.pl                  -  test/demo file
    file_reporter.pm         -  file reporter class used by test.pl


Version:  1.13
Date:  7/25/98

s. luebking
[email protected]



############################# Copyright #######################################

# Copyright (c) 1998 Scott Luebking. All rights reserved.
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
# 
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.

###############################################################################