Report Magic for Analog 1.0 Readme File

Please see the documentation starting at docs/index.html for complete
details on using Report Magic for Analog.

Feedback on Report Magic for Analog can be sent via email to
dgsupport@wadsack-allen.com.

KNOWN BUGS
----------
There is a BUGS page on the website. Check there for the most
recently found problems:
http://www.wadsack-allen.com/digitalgroup/reportmagic/bugs.asp

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
-------------------
(Somewhat in planned order.)

Modify several aspect of the output to be more internationalized. (For
example, "Most active xxxx" in the quick summary is not easily
translatable.) Also work to get the fonts in graphs to support Latin-1 and
Latin-2 character sets.

Implement command-line variables that can be used to override the values in
the configuration file. This would allow a vendor to create one
configuration file, that specifies the image of all reports, then override
the input and ouput parameters for specific sub-site reports.

Allow the use of date and time formats in filenames, so that output files
can be dated. Also allow the output files to mimic the input filename, even
if the input filename is specified by a command line option.

Currently, the two Time Summary reports contain a lot of hard-coded data. We
would like to devise a method that logically and succinctly represents the
kind of summary information on summary reports within the scope of the
rdata.ini report data configuration file. Also add more summary information,
such as "average" and "total" along with the current "busiest".

Some improvements could be added for accessibility by non visual browsers.
specifically, we are considering the advantages of including a LONGDESC
attribute in the FRAMES tags for the index page.

If you tell analog to include a header and/or footer and then format the as
COMPUTER, the header and footer docs are prepended and appended, repectively
to the computer generated output file. Currently Report Magic just ignores
anything that cannot possible be a report line. A future improvement would
be to read and parse this information and include it on each report page.

Also, and somewhat related, would an option to create a non frames version
of the output. The question on implementation of this is how to represent
the navigation menu. We could list the reports as Analog does or use some
other method if that is preferable.

And related to that, is the suggestion of developing a CGI version for use
on web pages. The goal would probably be to interface with Analog's forms
interface, with some (or all) Report Magic settings preconfigured on the
servers. Then allow users to select their report from the form and view them
as outputed by Report Magic.

Original file name: Read Me - converted on Monday, 13 September 1999, 21:35