Reuse

The emphasis in QMF on reuse allows you to deploy a consistent look and feel in reporting across your enterprise when you need it, which saves time and reduces your total cost of ownership.

To allow users to spend more time gaining insight from your business data and less time retrieving, formatting, and presenting that data, the queries that retrieve the data and the specifications you use to format that data can be designed as templates that are applied to the data at run time. You can save these templates to a server for indexing and reuse them in different situations. For example, a query that was designed to output the salary history for the sales team can be reused to display salary history for technical support personnel in a different division. The format of the resulting report is not tightly bound to a given entity; it can be used with entirely different queries that retrieve the same types of data.

To allow for even greater flexibility, substitution variables can be used as placeholders that can be replaced with actual values at run time. You can set substitution variables, whose values are used for a particular SQL query at run time, or global variables, which can be set and then used by several objects (for example, queries, reports, or procedures) for the duration of the entire QMF session. In QMF for Workstation and WebSphere®, variable values can be set to be retained between sessions or re-initialized to default values, entirely at the discretion of the content creator or administrator.