AskPlus is the reporting engine used by Visimage.  Reports developed in Visimage are executed natively by AskPlus on the host server.

Designed for computing professionals and IT staff, AskPlus offers advanced, query, report and update capabilities coupled with excellent performance.  Reports can either be written using the AskPlus command syntax or developed visually using the Visimage for Windows user interface. AskPlus runs natively on the host server.  AskPlus is supported on HP e3000, HP-UX (other UNIX platforms) and Windows NT.  Because AskPlus is located on the server, it is easy to create and execute host job streams (HP e3000) and scripts (UNIX/NT).

On HP e3000 systems, AskPlus supports TurboImage databases, MPE, KSAM and SD files.  On UNIX and NT systems, AskPlus supports Oracle and Eloquence databases, flat and indexed files.

Data can be selected from multiple databases and files in a single query.  The powerful link staement allows the user to fully control how datasets, tables and files are joined together.

The AskPlus interface to TurboImage and Eloquence is identical.  Therefore reports developed on the HP e3000 for TurboImage can be run on HP-UX with Eloquence with no changes.  The same is true for Visimage reports.

The AskPlus language is similar to HP's Query/iX product, and Query developers will find AskPlus easy to use.  Askplus, however, offers many advanced features not available with Query.

• Use expressions (including parentheses) and date conversions when selecting, sorting and reporting data.
• Support for temporary variables (registers) and arrays.
• Update fields with dynamically calculated values
• Update fields based on conditions

Vital Soft provides an automatic conversion that converts Query reports to AskPlus.  This program is available free to all supported customers.

AskPlus is not an application development environment, however, AskPlus can be extremely useful for database administrators to perform database updates and to resolve data integrity issues.  AskPlus supports Insert (Add), Update and Delete commands.