Guide to Reporting Improvements

Visual FoxPro 9's Report System has undergone a thorough revision. This topic sketches the broad outlines of the changes, and provides you with information about where to look for details.

The following main areas of enhancements to the Report System are covered in sections of this topic.

• Design-time enhancements.
  Multiple features and changes make designing reports in Visual FoxPro better for you and your end-users. The Report Builder Application re-organizes your design experience out-of-the-box. If you want to customize the design process, Report Builder dialog boxes and Report Designer events are fully exposed for you to do so.

• Multiple detail bands.
  You can handle multiple child tables and data relationships more flexibly in the revised Report Designer. When you run multiple-detail-band reports, you can leverage the new bands, with associated detail headers and footers, both for appropriate presentation of these relationships and for more capable calculations.

• Object-assisted run-time report processing.
  An entirely re-built output system, including a new base class, changes the way Visual FoxPro provides output report and label files at run time. Object-assisted reporting provides better-quality output, new types of output, and an open-architecture based on a new Visual FoxPro base class, the ReportListener. A programmable Report Preview interface interacts with ReportListeners to give you full control over report preview experience. The Report Preview Application provides improved out-of-the-box previewing facilities.

• Printing, rendering, and character-set-handling improvements.
  Visual FoxPro 9 makes better use of the operating system's printing features and GDI+ rendering subsystem. It also handles multiple locales and character sets better than previous versions. These changes are showcased in the Report System, and are accessible for use in custom code during report design and run-time processing.

• Extensible use of report and label definition files (.frx and .lbx tables).
  Visual FoxPro 9 handles your existing reports and labels without modification, while allowing you to add new features and behavior to these reports easily. This backward-compatible, yet forward-thinking, migration strategy is made possible by the Report System's newly-flexible handling of the .frx and .lbx table structure.

Design-time Enhancements

Numerous changes in the Report System help you enhance the design-time experience for developers and end-users. This section directs you to information about design-time improvements.

Report Designer Event Hooks and the Report Builder Application

The Report Designer now offers Report Builder Hooks, which enable you to intercept events occurring during a report or label design session to override and extend designer activity. The default Report Builder Application replaces many of the standard reporting dialog boxes with new ones written in Visual FoxPro code. Components of the Report Builder Application are exposed as Visual FoxPro Foundation Classes for your use.

Protection for End-User Design Sessions, and other Design-time Customization Opportunities

You can allow end-users to MODIFY and CREATE reports and labels, while setting limitations on what they can do in the Report Designer interface, using the new PROTECTED keyword. Protection is available individually by object and globally for the report. You can change what end-users see on the designer layout surface, from complex expressions to simple labels or sample data, while working in PROTECTED design mode, using Design-Time Captions. You can also provide helpful instructions, for both PROTECTED and standard design mode, by specifying Tooltips for report controls.

Enhanced Data Environment Use in Reports

You can save the Data Environment you designed for a Report or Label as a visual class. You can load a Data Environment into a Report or Label design from either a visual class or a previously-saved report or label.

Miscellaneous Design Improvements

There have been numerous enhancements to the Report and Label Designers. Some features are subtle changes to make design sessions more efficient and more enjoyable, and others improve your choices for resulting output.

Multiple Detail Bands

The Report Engine can now move through a scope of records multiple times. The records can represent related sets of detail lines in child tables, or they can be multiple passes through a single table. These multiple passes through a scope of records are represented as multiple detail bands.

Detail bands can have their own headers and footers, their own associated onEntry and onExit code, and their own associated report variables. Each detail band can be explicitly associated with a separate target alias, allowing you to control the number of entries in each detail band separately for related tables.

Multiple detail band reports provide many new ways you can represent data in reports and labels, and new ways you can calculate or summarize data, as you move through a record scope.

Object-assisted Run-time Report Processing

Visual FoxPro 9 has a new, object-assisted method of generating output from reports and labels. You can use your existing report and label layouts in object-assisted mode, to:

• Generate multiple types of output during one report run.

• Connect multiple reports together as part of one output result.

• Improve the quality of traditional report output.

• Dynamically adjust the contents of a report while you process it.

• Provide new types of output not available from earlier versions of Visual FoxPro.

This section covers the array of run-time enhancements that work together to support object-assisted reporting mode.

Object-Assisted Architecture and ReportListener Base Class

The new ReportListener base class and supporting language enhancements are the heart of run-time reporting enhancements.

Report Preview API and the Report Preview Application

Visual FoxPro 9's object-assisted reporting mode gives you complete control over report and label previews.

New Types of Output and the Report Output Component Set

Because you can subclass ReportListener, you can create new types of output. Visual FoxPro 9 supplies a Report Output Application to connect ReportListener subclasses with output types, as well as ReportListener-derived classes with enhanced output capabilities.

Migration Strategies and Changes in Output Rendering

You can use the design-time changes to improve all reports and labels, whether you choose backward-compatible or object-assisted reporting mode at run time.

When evaluating whether to switch to object-assisted reporting mode at run time, first consider items on the Reporting list of Important Changes in the Changes in Functionality for the Current Release topic, some of which are specific to this new method of creating output. .The topic includes a table of minor differences between backward-compatible and object-assisted reporting output. You can examine what effects these changes might have on individual existing reports, and use the recommendations in the table to address them. You will find additional details in the topic Using GDI+ in Reports.

Once you have experimented with your current reports, you can decide on a migration strategy for output:

• You can switch applications over to use object-assisted reporting mode completely, by using the command SET REPORTBEHAVIOR 90.

• You can use SET REPORTBEHAVIOR 90 but preface specific REPORT FORM commands for reports with formatting issues with SET REPORTBEHAVIOR 80, returning your application to object-assisted mode afterwards.

• You can use object-assisted mode all the time, but adjust your ReportListener-derived classes' behavior to suit specific needs. For example, you could change the default setting of the ReportListener's DynamicLineHeight Property to False (.F.).

• You can leave SET REPORTBEHAVIOR at its default setting of 80, and add an explicit OBJECT clause to specific reports at your leisure, as you have the opportunity to evaluate and adjust individual report and label layouts.

Printing, Rendering, and Character-set-handling Improvements

General changes to Visual FoxPro's use of Windows' printing, rendering and font-handling support the improvements in the Report System's output. These changes enhance your ability to support multiple printers and multiple languages in reports.

Extensible Use of Report and Label Definition Files

Underneath all the changes to the Visual FoxPro Report System, the Report Designer and Report Engine handle your report and label definitions using the same .frx and .lbx file structures as they did in previous versions. They change the way they use certain fields, without making these reports and labels invalid in previous versions, and they also allow you to extend your use of existing fields or add custom fields.

Visual FoxPro 9 provides a revised FILESPEC table for report and label files, with extensive information on the use of each column in earlier versions as well as current enhancements.

Visual FoxPro 9 also establishes a new, structured metadata format for use with reports. This format is an XML document schema shared with the Class Designer's XML MemberData.

The XML document format allows you to pack custom reporting information into a single report or label field. The default Report Builder Application makes it easy to add Report XML MemberData to report and label records.

See Also

Reference

Data and XML Feature Enhancements
SQL Language Improvements
Class Enhancements
Language Enhancements
Interactive Development Environment (IDE) Enhancements
Enhancements to Visual FoxPro Designers
Miscellaneous Enhancements
Changes in Functionality for the Current Release

Other Resources

What's New in Visual FoxPro