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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Third Party Report Writers

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    Third Party Report Writers

    Hello!

    I see that there was a discussion of R&R Report Writer and other third-party report writers - such as Crystal Reports - for A5 on this board a few weeks ago.

    My question is how does the built-in report writer in recent versions of Alpha Five stack up to the add-ons? Is there any reason to purchase a third-party report writer for most uses?

    Are there any capabilities of third-party report writers that should be included in future releases of A5?

    TIA,
    O.J.

    #2
    RE: Third Party Report Writers

    I've used Crystal and prefer Alpha's report generator. Especially when you consider a few of the features that are in v5 beta. The only aspect of Crystal that I like more is the ability to set up a series of condition detail sections (example: if condition 1 is met use detail section 1, etc) as it let me replace 26 reports with one (nearly full page detail sections requireing different layouts and data but using same trigger tests). Even with that capability I decided to keep using A5 instead of modifying the reports I set up in Crystal. (Wasn't testing v5 beta when I was setting up to use Crystal).

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Third Party Report Writers

      Let me preface this by saying that Alpha has an amazing report writer for a relational DBMS. That being said, Crystal's sole reason for being is writing reports and it is an excellent product. Beyond the conditional sections that Jim mentioned, there are many other features such as TopN Sorting (this may be in a5v5) and graphing that Crystal offers. The other great feature is that you are working simultaneously in a design mode and preview mode ( the data is with you as you design ). I have used Crystal extensively for years, but when in Alpha I always use Alpha's report writer and think it's excellent. I could not say the same thing about Access. The only time I ever used Crystal talking to Alpha data was to produce graphs.

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Third Party Report Writers

        Jim

        Jim Wrote:

        I've never used Crystal reports so I may be missing the piont. But I have a report that is built on a set that uses 7 conditional objects each based on a different table and only the tables that meet the condition for each object print in the detial section. For some records that all 7 for others just one.


        Nick
        dbd

        Comment


          #5
          RE: Third Party Report Writers

          Hi,

          I agree that Alpha has the best report writer. But I think that in R&R you can save the results of a report to a new table, which I think is a very powerful thing, and I would love to see it in Alpha.

          All the best,

          TR

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