Anyone who uses Reynolds and Reynolds ERA DMS software knows that it is full of information. How we access that information and use it for reporting purposes is another story. If you use ERA, you probably know about Query Builder, a tool that enables us to extract data and dump it into an Excel spreadsheet. With that said, does anyone have any good, useful queries that they have built that they'd be willing to share? Personally, I'm always looking for new ways to analyze data in my DMS without having to manually transpose data onto an Excel spreadsheet. The queries can be related to any department - sales, service, parts, body shop, accounting. Thanks.
Queries - Have any good ones to share?
- Thread starter andwrig
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For most prebuilt reports and unchangeable executables you can put the report on hold when printing it and then download to excel too... Not just limited to Query Builder!
Combined with a little training of the folks who stock in our new cars, I rigged up a spreadsheet to let us compute our sale pricing. We pull our entire new car inventory by stock number, model code, and year, then have a separate sheet that lays out the pricing structure management desires (rebates, whether or not to show GM Preferred price, et cetera...plus a separate sheet for VIN-specific reductions if we desire that). From there, the spreadsheet highlights which units' pricing doesn't jive, which lets us go in and change just those by hand. Still a bit of grunt work, but it's still obnoxiously fast compared to the old way!
I very often dump data to Excel using Query Builder. Does anyone else encounter difficulties with the way ERA wraps fields to extra lines if the data exceeds the field length? Instead of getting contiguous rows of data, I get gaps in the data where one field has wrapped into the row below it...
The interface to my ERA data (query builder )is so clunky that I would much rather pull all the data I might ever possibly need in one gigantic query (select * from serindex, basically) and pare it down in Excel. I can generate a lot of useful information by mining just three files in ERA: serindex, fimast, and customer.
once you save the report in 6910 and then go to report wizard, there is an option not to word wrap I believe. I hardly run reports that way.... I just have scripts that output the files via query builder. just dumps into a .dbf file and I can sort, manager, etc however I want.
Up until a few years ago you could build an Idescriptor that would enable you to define the field long enough that you did not get word wrap. Unfortunately this was a huge security hole that needed patching. I can only assume that the security team at Reynolds had decided enough was enough, word wraps could no longer be allowed to be avoided!
Do you not get errors when selecting everyfield from a file like serindex? I am fairly certain that the last pull I did of FIMAST errored out because I had selected to many fields. SECURITY BREACH> SOMEONE IS ACCESSING A FILE AND DUMPING MORE THAN 12 FIELDS>PATCH IT
You are correct, I would get some errors if I tried to pull every field. There seems to be a line limit between 1k-2k characters. I pull the fields that have the relevant data.
I think this is probably the best solution, but some of my data needs to be in a plaintext tab separated file.
Always someone trying to make a buck!
I wrote a little program in AutoIT to de-truncate my TAB separated Query Builder output, I just wanted to see if anyone else took a different approach. I still think Qsmith's approach is the easiest, but it doesn't work in my situation. Late reply, but hoping I can help. Look for fields that contain EA or FMT that appear to be similar- these fields are idescriptors that have the appropiate field length- failing that I wrote a bit of software that handles the wraps as they become predictable (concantonation) edit: I see I did reply but was still in my anger phase- I have now come to acceptance
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