{"id":20,"date":"2018-08-11T08:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-11T08:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/lisa\/post\/2018\/08\/11\/workday-reporting-and-other-noprogramming-abominations.aspx"},"modified":"2018-08-11T08:46:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-11T08:46:00","slug":"workday-reporting-and-other-noprogramming-abominations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/2018\/08\/11\/workday-reporting-and-other-noprogramming-abominations\/","title":{"rendered":"Workday Reporting and other NoProgramming abominations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Along with the exciting new world of NoSQL — allowing the universe to deal with unstructured data without constraints, not to mention without restraints —  there is a trend in new development to rely as much as possible on “NoProgramming”.   I don’t know if that’s a real term, or, if it is, if it’s defined the way I mean it here, so here goes.<\/p>\n

In the world of NoProgramming, you should be able to accomplish everything without the need of a programming language or language constructs.  <\/strong>You should be able to string blocks together in a visual fashion, whether in an IDE or in a web application, without ever (ew) having to learn any syntax.<\/p>\n

This is supposed to promote “ease of use”, to the point where the users of the application, who are supposed to be business users, are supposed to be able to configure everything themselves without the need for any development help.  Let’s be fair and say the “power users of the application” are supposed to be able to do this, not every user will be able to do it. <\/p>\n

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FWIW, Siebel actually called these people “configurators” – god forbid they should think they were “developing” an application.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/h3>\n

Take a simple and common reporting need: a “calculated” value or field<\/h3>\n

Consider the following reporting requirement, expressed as pseudocode:<\/p>\n

Take a different action<\/a> or (in a reporting context)
display a different string, depending on a value:<\/code><\/p>\n