Passing Parameters in a generic way

rbuser

We are looking at incoperating ReportBuilder into our product. The customers
want a generic report engine and we rather have them defining their reports
than us.

This looks like a trivial task with ReportBuilder but I have not been able
to find an answer to the question: How to pass parameters in a generic way.

I would like the customer to define reports were somehow the unknown values
can be incoperated into the query. These unknowns should then be presented
to the user upon report generation.

In MS Access it is possible to do this where every unknown parameter
triggers an input dialog.

In this report engine I have been looking for ways to define parameters in
the query wizard but I could not find any way to do that.

Please keep in mind that I do not know what the customer is going to report
on, therefore I have to provide a generic tool to the customer to define
their own parameter inputs. Hopefully I don't have to resort to the
scripting language as that would defeat the purpose of a generic reporting
engine.

To me this seems like a common issue, any suggestions or answers would be
very welcome.

Regards

Paul van Dinther
paul.vandinther@wirelessdatanz.com

digitalmetaphors

ReportBuilder has Autosearch which provides ask-at-runtime parameters. Look
in the installed RBuilder\Demos\Autosearch for some examples of this. When
designing a report using DADE, autosearch is handled automatically by adding
search criteria to the dataview and checking the autosearch checkbox on the
selected search field. See the help file on autosearch for a description
and its capabilities.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors