Report Writer comprises two programs REPSETUP and REPPRINT.
REPSETUP is an interactive program builder. By answering a series of questions, you tell REPSETUP the specification of a program you want to produce and REPSETUP produces it for you. When you specify a program it is stored on your applications database. Once you have written a program you can modify it, or take a copy of it to form the basis of another program.
REPSETUP allows you to:
Create or amend existing Report Writer programs
Copy an existing program to create a new program based on it
Automatically create report or export programs for selected tables
Move Report Writer programs from one database to another
Rename selected Report Writer programs
Print out details of Report Writer programs in summary or detail format
Test Report Writer programs, usually after making changes to the Data Dictionary
Delete all or selected Report Writer programs
REPPRINT allows you to run the programs created by REPSETUP. Because they are processed against the database at runtime, you can be confident that your programs always use the latest data. REPPRINT makes a single pass of the database and creates an extract file of the selected records. It processes the extract file to produce the report, export the file or delete the selected records.
If a change has been made to the database structure, any programs need to be reviewed, unless the data independence facility was used. In this case, the programs use the previous structure of the database.