What is UCO-Sqrl?

We use SQR (it's not so bad, and it was cheap with our Sybase purchase) for "canned reports" such as general ledgers, unit phone and address lists, contract/grant lists, etc., etc. Rather than have users learn the oddball sqr commandline flags, we put up a "Reports front end" which lets them choose a report from a menu of possible reports (multiple menus actually, for there are several categories of report: Fiscal, General, DB Info, etc).

The user chooses to Show (default), Print, or Save a report, and is prompted for the appropriate arguments to pass to the SQR (or any other) script. The output is then saved, printed, or displayed to the user as requested. PostScript output is displayed using GhostView. The correct print command is determined by the designer.

The backend of SQRL is a table in the server which describes all the possible reports. That table is presumably maintained by the DBA or MIS crew. The reports themselves are assumed to be gathered in a central "standard reports" directory somewhere on an accessible partition. All these attributes are controlled by global variables which you can set however you please.

SQRL is very simple, a typical Tcl/Tk application which just glues together several ugly pieces into one pretty control panel. It is fairly well-liked here because the sheer number of standard reports tends to exceed the average person's ability to memorize their names and arguments.

You could use SQRL with some other reporting language than SQR, or to front-end any set of command-line utilities for which you wanted to help and prompt users.