I
got a call from a guy I used to work with. He was producing a new report to
email the customers regularly. He knew what he wanted the report to look like.
Unfortunately, the actual report was not coming out the way he wanted. He asked
me for some pointers.
The
specific problem was that the text in the report was wrapping to the next line
at unexpected locations. I asked him to determine whether the tool he used to
view the report was also doing some wrapping of its own. We looked at the
report in binary format. We saw some carriage return characters inserted. Also
saw a bunch of spaces inserted. Both contributed to his problems.
I
have done reports using SQL before. It takes some tweaking to get your reports
to line up the way you want them to. Sometimes you need to set the width for
some columns in SQL*Plus (the report was spooling the output of SQL*Plus
executing a SQL script). Other times you need to set some parameters related to
wrapping.
I
don’t work on that project any more. Therefore, I did not go and solve all the
problems. I did review and confirm that there were no blatant problems with the
SQL For formatting problems such as these, you got to dig in and understand how
output is formatted by SQL*Plus. You can’t expect it to look just the way you
put_line() the data.
