Multiple report generation in one action

rbuser

D5, RB6.03 Ent

My end user designs and saves reports using the Report Explorer. Reports
have the normal pipelines, auto search criteria etc.

User previews individual reports via the Explorer and clicks 'OK' when the
Search criteria window shows. Fine for single reports.

How do I go about making it easy for the end user to select a number of
reports and have them all print while he goes and has a cup of tea.

Does anyone have examples or of code to achieve it preferably using the
Report Explorer to select the reports he wants to print.

digitalmetaphors

The solution is to create a custom report explorer form replacement so that
you can code this feaute into a menu option or popup option. Then you can
allow the multi selection to take place. Then when you want to print the
reports, you can print them all by loading each report in the selection and
print them. Assuming you have the same autosearch criteria for each report,
then for the first report, allow ShowAutoSearchDialog to be true so the user
cna enter some values. Then grab these values in the OnAutosearchDialogClose
event. Then when you programatically load the other reports
(Report.Template.LoadFromDatabase) and set ShowAutosearchDialog to false and
assign the autosearch values you've stored and apply them in the
Report.OnGetAutosearchValues event.

*See the Autoserach demos for an example of setting end user search criteria
in code.

*See the tutorials folder of our installation for an example of replacing
the report explorer form.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Sorry for intruding into other's topic, but I have a question.
But what whould he needed to do in the case when the reports have different
autosearch criterias?
There must be some way to fill all AutoSearch values first and then print
all the reports using inputted values.
Is there a way?

Thanks,
MB.

digitalmetaphors

You would have to load all of the reports to get hte autosearch fields, then
build a list of them so you could construct a single autosearch dialog that
showed all the fields. One way to do this is to create the autosearch fields
dynmaically for the first report so that the auto-created autosearch dialog
would create an all encompassing dialog and then grab the values entered
after the user close the dialog and stick them in a list for other reports,
just as the autosearch demos show how to get the values the user entered to
apply to SQL WHERE clauses and filters. Then as each subsequent repor tis
loaded, check the autosearch fields it needs and then apply the values
accordingly. Create a new class to handle all of this for the report
explorer. Basically, this class can be given a list of reports to be loaded
and it can load them, do the autosearch stuff and then print them one by one
with the appropriate search values. That way your code changes to a custom
report explorer form are minimal as the real code is delegated to the helper
class to print these reports from the database.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Thanks for all the advice this is now working beautifully!