Field Order in Report Wizard

rbuser

Hi

RB11.04Ent, Delphi 2007

The New Report Wizard presents the available fields in alphabetical order
and not the order of the fields specified in the Data tab. This
significantly slows down the process of report design. Any chance of the
the field order matching the column order. (This is how it used to be in
RB9)

Regards

Tim Murfitt

nardmoseley

RB 10 and RB 11 have the field names sorted. I believe this was changed
because many customers were complaining. Just goes to show you can never
make everyone happy.

To customize this behavior you can implement the TppDesigner.OnGetFields
event.

Or you can define a custom report wizard and register it with RB. Almost
every form and wizard is replaceable.

--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Nard

You should not have listened to them!

It is not obvious to me what is possible with the OnGetFields event. The
aFieldList seems to not do a lot. Could you give me a pointer to how I can
use it to get the fields in the same order as the dataview. I dont really
want to define custom report wizards if at all possible.

Regards

Tim Murfitt

nardmoseley

You can write some code to load the fields into the list.

Here is the default behavior, not the sort at the end...

aFields.Clear;

for liField := 0 to aDataPipeline.FieldCount - 1 do
begin
lField := aDataPipeline.Fields[liField];
if lField.Selectable then
aFields.AddObject(lField.FieldAlias, lField);
end;

if (aFields is TStringList) then
TStringList(aFields).Sort;



--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Nard

I see what you propose but how do I pick up the pipeline to get the field
name. As you will see from the code below the pipeline name is passed but
not the pipeline. Am I doing something wrong?


procedure TFormReports.ppDesigner1GetFields(Sender: TObject;
const aDataName: string; aFieldList: TStrings);
var liField : Integer;
lField : TppField;
begin
aFieldList.Clear;
for liField := 0 to aDataNamePipeline.FieldCount - 1 do
begin
lField := aDataPipeline.Fields[liField];
if lField.Selectable then
aFieldList.AddObject(lField.FieldAlias, lField);
end;
end;

nardmoseley

RB 11 has a TppReport.GetDataPipeline method

lDataPipeline := myReport.GetDataPipeline[aDataName];


Another approach is to use TppDataPipelineList to get a list of the
available datapipelines.

uses
ppDB:

var
lPipelineList := TppDataPipelineList.Create(myReport);

begin

lPipeline := lPipelineList[aDataName];

lPipelineList .Free;

end;


--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Nard

Thank you for your help. All sorted as required. For those that are
interested this is the code I used:


procedure TFormReports.ppDesigner1GetFields(Sender: TObject;
const aDataName: string; aFieldList: TStrings);
var i : Integer;
lField : TppField;
lDataPipeline : TppDataPipeline;
begin
lDataPipeline := repPlayer.GetDataPipeline(aDataName);
aFieldList.Clear;
for i := 0 to lDataPipeline.FieldCount - 1 do
begin
lField := lDataPipeline.Fields[i];
if lField.Selectable then
aFieldList.AddObject(lField.FieldAlias, lField);
end;
end;