Similar Reports... Help Please!!!

rbuser

Dears,

I am analyzing which generator of reports will adopt in my application...
Would he/she like him/it to know what Report Builder he/she offers to create
classes for reports that are similar?
I have several similar reports and he/she would not like to have to create
one to an and yes it would like to create a class to activate the
development.

Thanks,
[]s,

digitalmetaphors

The first approach is to use report templates. Templates can be stored in a
file or in a database. You can simple load one up into a report and add to
it. The cool features that templates give you is that they are fully
portable. The data access definition can be stored inside of the report
template, as opposed to creating the data access components on a form or
datamodule in Delphi. You can also store the report's event handlers in the
report template, which means you do not have to tie the report to a unit
where the event handlers are stored. The template allows you to update your
customer's database or files with new templates without having to recompile
you application and redistribute it. Even if you have to update the data
access and calculations, if you store them in the template using our Data
Access Development Environment (DADE) and Report Application Pascal (RAP)
respectively, then you do not have to recompile because we have our own SQL
generator and runtime interpreter built in.

You can use form inhertance if you want to store the report definition in
the ancestor and descend to use it. This has
limitation in that you cannot use data pipelines in the ancestor and you
cannot mix it with report templates.

There is another alternative, if you have common headers, footer, title
bands, say for a comapny logo, then you can use subreports to load
temlpates. There is an example called Dynamic Subreport Loading in the
installed RBuilder\Demos\EndUser\DynamicSubreportLoading directory which
does this. This allows you to define on template that is loaded
automatically in all reports that use this special subreport class to load
the template. The result is that you can change the template once, and all
the report that use it will be changed when they are run.

Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Fantastic!

Thank you,