Report inheritance

rbuser

Hi

I have a standard page header for all my reports. I don't want to edit all
of my existing reports to change their header info. I've look at using
templates, but that does not seems to solve my problem. Is there a simple
way I can inherit all my reports on a standard report without editing all my
reports manually?

Morten

rbuser

Well, if you don't use templates you could simply use VFI as always.
Simply place the base component on a form and inherit another one from it.
Unfortunately templates don't allow for inheritance at all. I have been
thinking of an RCL-component which might be able to emulate something
similar though...

Inheritable or at least nestable templates are definitely one of my top
feature wishes.

Oliver
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rbuser

I have a similar problem. I have some logos and other stuff that I want to
re-use in many reports. The reports are stored in a database. But I have an
idea:

It would be great to use SubReports of type pbFixed to hold re-usable
elements. Then I need to be able to load subreport contents from a separate
table at run-time.

Now, the TppSubReport has a Report property, which has a Template property,
which has the LoadFromDatabase method and it's own DatabaseSettings. Is it
possible to use this to load standard SubReports into larger reports?

A bit of code would be required to take care of such loading at appropriate
times (for all previews and printing). But then the problem would be solved,
wouldn't it, for me and for the original poster, and inheritance wouldn't be
that much needed.

Imagine, after a number of standard subreport building blocks have been
defined, one would be able to compose large complex reports in no time.

digitalmetaphors

Subreports are pretty powerful, in that you can use them to load a title,
header, or footer band. There is an example of leveraging dynamic subreport
loading, as an alternative to inheritance. See your installed
RBuilder\Demos\EndUser\DynamicSubreportLoading.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors