Output Formats
Usage Summary reports are available in the following formats:
■
Text. This format is suitable for printing and reading, but not for parsing.
■
HTML. This format is suitable for posting textual reports to a web page.
■
Report Interchange Format (RIF). This format is a simple, flexible,
plain text format that is designed to pass tabular information between the
report generator and another program, such as a spreadsheet. Fields are
delimited by multiple spaces.
Textual reports are written to a single RIF file; each page of a multipage
graphical report is written to a separate RIF file. Sequential numbers (starting
with 0) are appended to the file name base of the RIF files and they have the
extension .rif. A Table of Contents RIF file is generated for each RIF report and
is named output_filename_base _toc.rif.
Format Specification:
#BEGIN HEADER
header lines
#END HEADER
// These lines contain
#cols [#rows] name of dataset
// info for the first
column labels
// table.
[rows]
If you break down data by more than one category in a Usage Summary report
written in RIF, each of the categories is presented in its own column.
More than one table may be contained in a RIF file. The #rows entry is not
present if the file contains rows from only one table. If the #rows entry is
missing, read all of the rows until the end of the file. If there is more than one
table in the RIF file, the table-specific portion of the format is repeated for
each additional table.
// These lines contain
#cols [#rows] name of dataset
// the first table.
column labels
//
[rows]
20 | Chapter 5 Report Input and Output
