Certificate of conformance document

Many companies issue a 'certificate of conformance' (COC) document for the products that they ship. There is a default document in Priority that is based on delivery notes, but of course, the wording in this document is fixed, whereas every company wants different text. One of my customers asked me to create such a document that would be based on shipping documents, so this was a fairly simple exercise in HTML document programming.

My contact person for this customer used to work with another of my customers, and presumably during the course of a conversation comparing notes, he mentioned that I had created such a document for them. So customer #2 wanted a document ... except that they wanted the document to be based on orders with completely different text.

I started work on creating the new document and immediately ran into the first problem: how many documents do they expect to create from one order? One, for the entire order? One per line? One per device connected to each line? It turns out that they want a document for each device, making my work problematic.

An order line can have a quantity greater than one, and so there may be more than one device with its unique serial number connected to the line. In the standard form for shipping documents, the quantity in the line is displayed, along with a separate report (in Priority terms) that prints a list of serial numbers. This is not what the customer wanted.

My problem was that the input to the HTML document would be orders but the cursor would have to run on devices. I tried various approaches but couldn't get the HTML document to work properly (if at all). After writing a letter explaining why I couldn't provide what the customer wanted, the rubber duck to whom I had been explaining the problem spoke up, pointing out that I could write a separate program that would create a linked file of devices, then invoke the COC document with that linked file.

Indeed. This approach works, although I had some problems at the beginning. In the end, I deleted the HTML document that I had created and created a new one by copying an HTML document that I wrote that prints data about devices. I removed most of the subreports of this copied document and restored the few subreports that I had written for the original COC document. This works!

One more problem that took some time to solve: the COC document will be in English, and I added the E flag in the procedure header. But the document created by the calling procedure had some left to right problems. Eventually I remembered that I had written about this problem a few years ago and how to solve it.

Following is the code of the calling procedure (this is helped by the fact that the customer had previously requested the addition of the order line to which the device is connected; this is default behaviour with shipping document lines):

LINK ORDERS TO :$.ORD;
ERRMSG 1 WHERE :RETVAL <= 0;
LINK SERNUMBERS TO :$.SER;
ERRMSG 1 WHERE :RETVAL <= 0;
INSERT INTO SERNUMBERS (SERN, SERNUM)
SELECT ORIG.SERN, ORIG.SERNUM
FROM ORDERS, ORDERITEMS, SERNUMBERS ORIG
WHERE ORDERS.ORD = ORDERITEMS.ORD
AND ORDERITEMS.ORDI = ORIG.TEST_ORDI
AND ORIG.SERN > 0
AND ORDERS.ORD > 0;
EXECUTE WINHTML '-d', 'TEST_WWWCOC', 'SERNUMBERS', :$.SER, '-e';
UNLINK ORDERS;
UNLINK SERNUMBERS;