General HydroStatics
Ship Stability Software
Command of the Week
(New or interesting aspects of GHS that you may not know about)

DB Reports
(Requires GHS version 17.00 or later)

After you have accumulated report files in the Data Base (see the earlier COW on this), DB Reports comes into its own for quickly locating and viewing reports.

The scope of what you see in the DB Reports listing is automatically narrowed to include only those reports generated from the current Geometry File and current Project name. But if there is no Geometry File (i.e. if the READ command has not been issued or if the CLEAR command has removed the GF), then all reports are listed regardless of which GF they belong to. Likewise if there is no Project name in effect, then reports from all projects are shown.


Therefore if you issue the DB Reports command in a new session of GHS, all report files are represented in the listing. This is the same listing you get from the "Show all" button.

Since report files are not normally deleted when new ones are generated, you can quickly accumulate a lot of report files of the same name (but with different times). DB Reports is the only way to access the older report files, and it provides a way to view and delete them as shown in the earlier COW on this subject.

But there is a way to avoid keeping the prior version of a report in the first place.

When a report is initiated with DB Report it accepts /ONLY as a parameter. Thus DB Report "T&S Book", "/ONLY" deletes any prior versions of the report it is generating.

As promised in the earlier COW, there is a reason to prefer DB commands such as DB Print even with open files: the Data Base will store your preferred parameters and apply them automatically. For example,

DB Report "/DEFAULTS", "/ONLY /Box:BW" causes these two parameters to be applied with every report without having to give them explicitly.

Likewise,

DB Print "/DEFAULTS", "/COUNT" causes the page-count option to be applied automatically.

What does that little Ren button do? "Ren" stands for Rename. It allows you to change the name and/or project designation of a report file, but not the Geometry File identification.


Any guess as to why it was done that way?

By the way, with a large number of report files, you may find DB Reports taking some seconds to come up. If so, the remedy is in 17.02A and later GHS versions.

Questions, comments, or requests?
Contact Creative Systems, Inc.

support@ghsport.com

USA phone: 360-385-6212 Fax: 360-385-6213
Office hours: 7:00 am - 4:00 pm Pacific Time, Monday - Friday

Mailing address:
PO Box 1910
Port Townsend, WA 98368 USA

www.ghsport.com

Click here for an index to this and previous COWs