Perspectives on information management

Using

COBOLReportwriter

Structured COBOL Report Writer by David Schechter and George Yvkoff. Published by PrenticelHall International. X19.95. Most data processing departments exist to produce reports for the operational departments of their organization: structured reports with subtotals and summaries for time periods, organizational subdivisions, customers or other control levels. Nonreporting programs are generally concerned with organizing input data into the information content of reports. Any data processing manager knows how the end user departments are always wanting new reports, or ‘small’ changes in the structure of existing reports, and also knows how difficult it can be to get them implemented quickly and correctly. Report programs can be written using the normal facilities of general purpose programming languages, such as PL/I or COBOL, but many organizations prefer to separate the complications of report generation from their normal processing

programs and use one of the many specialized report generation packages which are available. An alternative solution is to use the report generation facility built into standard COBOL, the COBOL Report Writer. Mention of the Report Writer raises strong feelings in the COBOL world. People tend to be either wildly or equally strongly enthusiastic, antagonistic towards it. The split is almost coincident with that between those who have tried seriously to understand Report Writer and those who have not. Schechter and Yvkoff are clearly enthusiasts, and feel that the whole data processing community would benefit from adopting their view of the correct way to generate reports. They have produced a very clear and complete description of the Report Writer, explaining not only what each feature does but also why and where it might be used. The presentation starts by describing a program to list a file, written in ordinary COBOL, and contrasting with the corresponding

program written using Report Writer. In this case there is little difference in the size of the two programs, although the Report Writer version has a much simpler Procedure Division, unobscured as it is by the detail of formatting the output. Additional facilities are introduced in the context of adding features to this report, and in developing another program for a similar report. Examples of coding and their effect on the output are presented at each stage. This book will be very useful to anyone who is responsible for the production of report programs, whether as a programmer or as a manager. They will benefit if they are looking with an open mind for better programming tools, and even if they already use Report Writer they will probably find aspects of it explained here that they did not appreciate before.

P R BROWN National Computing

Centre

Compilationof managementfeatures Perspectives on information management. Published by John Wiley &3 Sons Ltd. 480~~. f14.95. Perspectives on information management is a compilation of articles published in Computerworld magazine’s ‘In-depth’ and ‘EXTRA!’ feature slots between 1979 and 1981. The subjects discussed in the articles cover MIS management,

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managing computer people, hardware, software, communications, database, distributed processing and the law relating to computers. The authors are experts in their particular fields, and the articles are to a large extent general overviews of a given area, intended to have a longer life than news features. In the computer resource management section, as an example, the following areas are covered:

requirements costing: a better way to select a DBMS l a guide to preparing an MIS standards manual 0 natural project control l putting management back into MIS l development tools for decision support systems According to the senior editor of Computerworld, Jack Rochester, this selection represents ‘the best and brightest thinking in the field’. l

data processing