DSReport

by Gregg Berkholtz - President
GB Computers

The November 1999 PANUG meeting featured the click:VISION Manager product developed by John McCann. This is a Windows application that will pull information out of NDS and report it back to you. It also allows you to manipulate that info and place it back into NDS. click:VISION Manager is very much a full-featured product.

For those of us who just need to extract information from NDS, import it into a spreadsheet or database program and display it, there is a free, open source program called DSReport available on the Novell developer site. It will export just about any value out of NDS.

DSReport allows the selection of more than one DS attribute by holding down the CTRL key when selecting items. This is valuable when looking for the given name, phone number, and last login time of a group of users, for example. The results of this query is data in the form of a comma delimited file for importing into your favorite spreadsheet or database program.

You can find DSReport at http://developer.novell.com/engsup/sample/tids/D3NDSRPT/. When you go to this web site with your web browser, you'll not see a web page. Rather, you'll see a list of files. You want to download the file called d3ndsrpt. If you use Delphi, you'll also find files in this directory that will allow you to modify the program for your own purposes.

Note that you must run the DSReport program on a machine using Client32. It will not work with Microsoft's Client for NetWare or older 16-bit Novell clients.

I found this tool useful, and a great time-saver in some cases. I hope some of you do too.