Within the CMS supervisor, adding a field to a report and selecting NAME for 'show value as' produces the entity name instead of it's value. The name is extracted automatically from the Dictionary.

I need to do be able to access entity names when using an external report writer connected to the CMS tables via an ODBC connection to the CMS Informix dbase. However, I cannot see the dictionary as a table over ODBC.

Do you know a good way to do this value-> name transformation from the external reporter?

The table is called Synonyms, you join the field you want to convert to the VALUE field in this table and then use the ITEM_NAME field to display.
This example uses the Synonyms tables to extract the Skill name and Agent name from the daily Agent stats table. The Synonyms table has to be joined twice in this example to extract the 2 different types of names (aliased here as "a" for agent name and "s" for skill name).

SELECT ACD,
ROW_DATE,
LOGID,
a.item_name As LoginName,
SPLIT,
s.item_name As SplitSkill,
Sum(ACDCALLS) As SumACDCalls,
Sum(ACDTIME) As SumACDTime
FROM dagent, synonyms s, synonyms a
WHERE dagent.SPLIT=s.value AND
dagent.ACD=s.ACD_NO AND
s.item_type='split' AND
dagent.LOGID=a.value AND
dagent.ACD=a.ACD_NO AND
a.item_type='agname' AND
dagent.ACD=3 AND
ROW_DATE=(TODAY - 1 UNITS DAY)
GROUP BY ACD,ROW_DATE,LOGID,
a.item_name,SPLIT, s.item_name

The join is made using the ACD field (for multi-ACD environments), the ITEM_TYPE field and then the VALUE field. Useful values for ITEM_TYPE are:
acd, agname, split,
vdn, vector, aux_rsn,
logout_rsn

Thanks, Lester. This table name had eluded me.