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New Blog Posts: Merging Reports - Part 1 and Part 2

Changeover from Quickreports / QRDesign

edited March 2003 in End User
I am replacing a reporting interface for an application that up until now
has used the above products.
To maintain features already available in existing app I need to do the
following :-

Provide a basic set of customisable reports.
Provide the ability for the user to define their own reports,

Thats easy... but now for the harder bit,

The current app allows for disabling certain reports for certain users - am
I able to manipulate the report explorer to this extent?

Also the app chooses different versions of reports to run based on choices
made in the data. eg Different job types automatically run a different
invoice template, the template to use is defined by a set of options
maintained by the user. How can this be acheived by the report explorer?

Have I understood the docs correctly when they seem to suggest that end user
reports can only use the database method of storing report layouts and not
report template files?

Thanks in advance
Rhonda Ridge
Ab Initio Software
www.abinitiosoftware.co.uk

Comments

  • edited March 2003
    You can provide reports that are customizable by using the TppDesigner
    component hooked up to a TppReport component. You can load report templates
    into this report object and show the designer. User's can also create new
    reports using this component. There are examples of this in the end user
    demos of our installation. There is also plenty of good end user and
    delpoyment information in the Developer's Guide pdf located in the
    installation root directory.

    The report explorer is designed to manage the report templates which are
    stored in a database.

    To disable current reports for certain users, simply take on eof our end
    user database demos, and add a field on the database for access rights. Then
    filter the rbFolder and rbItem table datasets on the form before showing the
    report explorer.

    Using the report explorer, you can see all of the templates and load any one
    that you want. At runtime, you can do this by calling
    Report.Template.LoadFromDatabase after you configure the
    Report.Template.DataSettings property to pick the report that you want to
    load/save

    The ReportExplorer is designed to work only on databased report templates,
    not file based report templates. If you just want to preview/print reports
    from the client, our server edition allows you to build a thin client
    application using the ClientReportExplorer which can print reports from the
    server. The server can have reports that are template based (file or
    database), archives, or form based reports. There is also a WebTier which
    allows you to publish the same reports over the web and a javascript/xhtml
    web report explorer is created for the client browser to show the reports
    which looks like the standard TppReportExplorer component.

    Cheers,

    Jim Bennett
    Digital Metaphors


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