a tip re subreports in Alpha Five
From [email protected]
sub reporting tip re Alpha Five http://nddi.net/videos/printhtml/
A little background:
One of the requirements that needs to be addressed in application development is the ability to create multiple sub-reports with your reporting tool. Sub-reports provide us a way to print information from child tables (e.g. Invoice Detail, Payments. Notes, etc.) related to the parent table (e.g. Invoice Header) in multiple different formats. This has been available in Alpha using "Sets" when based on DBF files. Unfortunately, DBFs are not the best option for professional applications for a number of reasons (a topic for discussion at some other time). But RDBMSs (MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.) cannot currently be used in a sub-report in the current Alpha Five report writer.
HOWEVER, once again Alpha provides a way to solve this problem.
The video shows a technique that not only gives you some incredible fine grained control of your layout, but also leverages existing HTML coding knowledge. What appears to be a rather simple little function - PrintHTML() - opens some seriously powerful capabilities for any developer's reporting toolkit. In short - you have COMPLETE control of your layout in any given segment of your report. If you can design it in HTML, you can display it on a report. This particular customer has a "boilerplate" need. We merge both HTML information stored in the event header table, with detail (sub-report style information) from the Event Detail tables to create nicely formatted proposals, contracts and invoices.
In addition, there are performance and flexibility gains by moving the initial creation of HTML and layout information to the SQL Server rather than Alpha as shown in the video.
Let me know if this gives you enough to go on, or feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
_________________________________________
Jim Dusoe
From [email protected]
sub reporting tip re Alpha Five http://nddi.net/videos/printhtml/
A little background:
One of the requirements that needs to be addressed in application development is the ability to create multiple sub-reports with your reporting tool. Sub-reports provide us a way to print information from child tables (e.g. Invoice Detail, Payments. Notes, etc.) related to the parent table (e.g. Invoice Header) in multiple different formats. This has been available in Alpha using "Sets" when based on DBF files. Unfortunately, DBFs are not the best option for professional applications for a number of reasons (a topic for discussion at some other time). But RDBMSs (MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.) cannot currently be used in a sub-report in the current Alpha Five report writer.
HOWEVER, once again Alpha provides a way to solve this problem.
The video shows a technique that not only gives you some incredible fine grained control of your layout, but also leverages existing HTML coding knowledge. What appears to be a rather simple little function - PrintHTML() - opens some seriously powerful capabilities for any developer's reporting toolkit. In short - you have COMPLETE control of your layout in any given segment of your report. If you can design it in HTML, you can display it on a report. This particular customer has a "boilerplate" need. We merge both HTML information stored in the event header table, with detail (sub-report style information) from the Event Detail tables to create nicely formatted proposals, contracts and invoices.
In addition, there are performance and flexibility gains by moving the initial creation of HTML and layout information to the SQL Server rather than Alpha as shown in the video.
Let me know if this gives you enough to go on, or feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
_________________________________________
Jim Dusoe