Enable one group at a time
My report dialog before running the report offers the user 5 different ways to summarize the data. I sort the SQL data source according to the option the user selected, and then present the report with detail and summary OR with the grouped summary alone depending on the user option (making detail invisible if they only want summary).
Works fine if ONLY one group. If the user selects grouping by data field A,B,C,D, or E - they want to see the group summary for only the group they selected. But if I add all 5 groups to the group footer, they see a break and summary for every group change. I tried making the 4 groups they do not want to see invisible, and true they disappear, but the remaining group keeps breaking for all the groups.
I see the advantage of this for other situations, but for my needs, it would be nice to disable 4 of the 5 groups (group header and group footer). If that can not work, what is the most efficient method? Considering there may be considerable changes in style, language and so forth in the future, I would rather not have 5 totally separate report forms, though that would obviously work. My main two other options would appear to be 1) create a report form with detail only and no groups, using inheritance for 5 different forms, 2) one controlling dialog form as I have now, with 5 different report components on it.
My experience with inheriting 5 different report forms and reports is that it is a much bigger hassle down the road maintaining and extending code changes, language terms and so forth, so I am thinking option 2, unless I can programmatically skip the grouping not desired.
Scott S.
Works fine if ONLY one group. If the user selects grouping by data field A,B,C,D, or E - they want to see the group summary for only the group they selected. But if I add all 5 groups to the group footer, they see a break and summary for every group change. I tried making the 4 groups they do not want to see invisible, and true they disappear, but the remaining group keeps breaking for all the groups.
I see the advantage of this for other situations, but for my needs, it would be nice to disable 4 of the 5 groups (group header and group footer). If that can not work, what is the most efficient method? Considering there may be considerable changes in style, language and so forth in the future, I would rather not have 5 totally separate report forms, though that would obviously work. My main two other options would appear to be 1) create a report form with detail only and no groups, using inheritance for 5 different forms, 2) one controlling dialog form as I have now, with 5 different report components on it.
My experience with inheriting 5 different report forms and reports is that it is a much bigger hassle down the road maintaining and extending code changes, language terms and so forth, so I am thinking option 2, unless I can programmatically skip the grouping not desired.
Scott S.
Comments
Instead of inheritance or manually managing groups, have you considered using report templates? Report templates (.rtm files) are file based report definitions that can easily be loaded into a single report component on a form as needed.
Templates can be saved/loaded to/from file or DB either from the designer or in code. See the TppTemplate topic in the RB help for more information.
Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com