HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
HP BRW Enhancements by Mary Wernette Software Technology Division HP BRW is a high performance, mainframe-class business report writer, available on the HP 3000 since 1986. The BRW team has been very aggressive over the past year in its engineering efforts. The result is a small and shrinking backlog of enhancement and service requests, making an already solid product outstanding! This release of HP Business Report Writer adds three enhancements. SUPPORT FOR 21ST CENTURY DATES HP BRW supports dates well after the year 2000. BRW also recognizes the two digit 21st century date implementation chosen by Hewlett-Packard Financial Management and Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing Management products. Now you can rest assured that the life of BRW extends well into the foreseeable future! As always, your BRW reports may continue to run unchanged for years and years to come. RUN-TIME PERFORMANCE IMPROVED The run-time performance of BRW has been improved at least 10 percent. You do not need to do any special tuning to enjoy this performance uplift. Your reports automatically run faster. SUPPORT FOR VERY LARGE NUMBERS The BRW numeric type is a form of packed decimal with 19 digits. Previous to MPE/iX Release 4.5, this numeric type included six permanent decimal points, leaving 13 digits for the whole number; enough to express numbers up to nine trillion; however, when the Mexican peso was trading at over 3000 pesos to the U.S. dollar, 13 whole digits were not enough. Mexico and other Latin American countries requested that larger numbers be supported to address the rising currency exchange rates. A new field has been added to the Global Values screen of the BRWSETUP program. It provides a configuration option to split the 19 digits and have either six, four, two, or zero decimals. This allows 13, 15, 17, or 19 whole number digits. The field is called Number of decimals. The field default is six, but values of six, four, two, or zero are accepted. At zero, numbers up to a million trillion may be expressed. Reports compiled with a decimal configuration less than six lose their backwards compatibility and may only run with the enhanced run-time version, MPE/iX Release 4.5 or later. If the ability to express numbers up to nine trillion is sufficient for your applications, please ignore this configuration option. The option impacts how numbers are internally represented in BRW, not how numbers are displayed in a report.