Oracle SQL*Plus: The Definitive Guide

Other Reporting Topics

In addition to what you’ve read so far in this chapter, there are several other techniques and topics worth discussing. One is a method for getting the current date into your page titles. Considering how easy it is to do page numbers, it’s surprisingly difficult to do dates. Report headers and footers function similarly to page headers and footers, except that they print just once, at the beginning and end of a report.

If you find yourself printing reports only because you need to look at computed values such as group totals and report totals, you will want to read the section on summary reports that follows. You can save yourself a lot of network and other overhead by summarizing your data on the server instead of returning all the detail records and making SQL*Plus do the work.

Getting the Current Date into a Header

It’s a very common practice to put the run date in the header of a report. It’s such a common practice, in fact, that it’s a wonder Oracle does not provide a convenient way to do it. Unlike the case with the page number, which SQL*Plus conveniently maintains in the SQL.PNO user variable, the date is not so easily available. How then, do you display the date in the page header? The answer is to retrieve it from the database, put it into a user variable, and display that variable in the header.

You saw how to display the contents of a user variable in the header when the Project Hours and Dollars Detail report was converted to a master/detail ...