A report procedure outputs to the screen by default and takes control of the application by building reports and pausing one screen at a time. Since this behavior takes control away from the user, you also learned to create a more user friendly interface for reports based on the OUTPUT TO statement. Essentially, report output gets redirected from the screen to a temporary file, and then the procedure reads the report results into an editor in a dialog box. This section discusses the OUTPUT TO statement and shows you how to send report output to text files and printers.

Other uses include sending reports to text tables or UNIX devices. See ABL Reference for more information about these uses of the OUTPUT TO statement.