User guide

ENFORM Processing Environment
Introduction
058058 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1–3
The following paragraphs provide a brief overview of the tasks shown in Figure 1-1
(refer to Sections 2, 3, and 4 for detailed information). The tasks are organized into
steps as follows:
1. Design the data base. This guide does not describe a process for data base design.
Section 2 does, however, discuss some basic guidelines for developing or
producing a data base to be used with ENFORM.
2. Use the Data Definition Language (DDL) to describe the data. Submit the DDL
source code to the DDL compiler which produces source code for the File Utility
program (FUP) and the data declaration sections of COBOL, FORTRAN, and TAL
programs. The DDL compiler also produces a dictionary that provides a
description of the data to all the applications using the data base.
3. Use FUP to process the source code from the previous step and to create the
physical GUARDIAN/ENSCRIBE files that store the data.
4. Choose a method of loading the data. In Figure 1-1, an ENABLE-generated
application is used. ENABLE accesses the dictionary to extract record descriptions
of the data; the application it creates allows you to load the data into the data base.
Alternatively, you could use the data declaration source code created by the DDL
compiler to produce a high level language program that loads the data.
5. Use the ENFORM language elements to write requests, called queries, that retrieve
data from the data base and format the retrieved data into a report.
ENFORM Processing
Environment
The environment in which ENFORM processes data consists of several components.
These components can be divided into three categories:
1. The required user-supplied components: a dictionary, a data base, and a query
specification. To supply these components, complete the tasks described earlier in
this section.
2. The ENFORM processes: the query compiler/report writer and the query
processor. Tandem supplies these processes with ENFORM.
3. The optional user-supplied components: a host language program and an
ENFORM server. (A host language program allows you to use ENFORM to access
data through the host language interface. An ENFORM server allows you to use
ENFORM to access data that ENFORM would normally find unusable.)
The following paragraphs briefly describe these components and the role that each
plays in the ENFORM processing environment.