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Issue 12.2 ('Inefficiencies')
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FEATURE

Smart Reporting

Implementing a custom reporting system

Issue: 12.2 (March/April 2014)
Author: Trisha Duke
Author Bio: Trisha Duke is lead developer for Mediatec Limited, London and has been using Xojo for several years.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 12,138
Starting Page Number: 19
Article Number: 12205
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project12205.zip Updated: 2014-03-03 00:48:07

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

A bit of history

When I first started using REALbasic back in 2005, I used On-Target-Report as my reporting tool, but I was facing lots of problems creating reports for my applications.

Basically, if the SQLite or RSD file had any non-valid query or view, then On-Target-Report didn't even open at all. The other problem is On-Target-Report only allowed you to create columnar reports and without images. You can have a logo in the report but not an image for each item. I also discovered the program duplicated item information when the bottom space is not large enough and there is a need to go to the next page. Also, if you happen to have a calculation in one of the columns, it did not total properly as it duplicated values which happened to show up at the bottom of the page and the beginning of the next page.

For other reports like invoices and item reports with variable height fields, I needed to create HTML files and then show it in the HTMLViewer with a button to print, but I discovered many problems with this since the printer needed to be selected when opening the application. I saved the printer setup string in a table for each user, but for some reason, when I tried to assign it back from the string to the printer, it did not work. I faced lots of problems with printers both on Mac and Windows machines.

I therefore decided to create a reporting structure for my applications which would be flexible, easy to configure, and not prone to any of the problems encountered previously.

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