AS400 Tutorials

We all have data… data, data everywhere and we need it in a user friendly form that makes sense. Data drives business, so the less time you spend getting at what you need the more time you can focus on getting important things done.

This is where report mining comes in.

You may not have heard the term “report mining” before but essentially report mining is just taking your printable reports from your AS40 or iSeries and bringing them over to your PC into a program like Excel, then scrubbing them up a bit.

Maybee you need to calculate some additional fields or condense the data into an easy to read format. This is where report mining can really come through.

Getting data off of your AS400 to a PC used to be a major hassle back in the dark ages… in fatc people hated it so much that software vendors sprung up all over to accomplish this now routine task.

If you have the luxury of having a programmer on staff that can write reports all day long then your in luck. But some places can’t and hiring an outside consultant to write reports at $175 dollars an hour adds up quickly.

Another option is using the excellent tool you might have is Query/400. This allows you to write simple reports joining together data from one or more files. 

Unfortunatley Query has limited logic capabilities that are handled better by regular programmed reports, but for probably 80% of the reporting needed it will suffice.

Anyhow, back to report mining. If the data you want to get at is already a part of an existing report then you are in luck. No need to write a query since you can just mine that report to get what you want.

The process is really simple and takes only a few mouse clicks.

Using Operations Navigator you can simply browse the printer data on the system then drag and drop any report on your As400 or iSeries onto your desktop. The software then automatically converts it into a text file.

Now this works with reports that are still in an outq on the system. The best way to handle this is to have your spool files go to your own output queue that is not attached to a writer.

After copying the file over to your PC, simply open up that text file with the Excel data import wizard, add the column breaks, clean up the report headings and you are off to the races.

This really is a poor mans way to generate reports, but its really simple and you should already have all the tools to do it installed on your computer.

All you need is Operations Navigator (aka iSeries Navigator) and Excel.

If you need something more complex then look into the other options out there like writing reports using Query or the Excel Add-in.

Tags:   AS400 · iSeries · Report · Spool FileNo Comments