The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

February 1995

Reporting With Variable

Number of Copies

by Toni Mas of S.Quirze del Vallês,

BARCELONA SPAIN.

A lot of times, within an aplication, we must launch reports with a number of copies and we all know that running on Windows each ‘report ...‘ instruction has a performance cost. Due to that fact I’ve been trying different ways to make the reports with copies appearing as pages for Windows to launch an unique ‘report’ command and have better performance. This problem is still worse when the number of copies of a document I variable depending on each record of our database.

Let’s see an example:

I’ve got a 'Customer' table where each costumer has different number of copies per invoice to be sent. In the other hand I’ve got a header invoice file called ‘head_mv’ and another file containing several lines per each header called ‘Iines’.When we run the invoice report we must send different number of copies each invoice depending on its customer.We cannot modify the ‘system.ini’ file ‘cause it must be different each time and it’ll be a patch.

I’ve written this procedure that takes from the calling program the followind data parameters:

Iloc * A string that contains 'Printer' or ‘Screen’ to

Then I propose to doing it this way (it works for me):

I. .We create a cursor that will contain a record for each copie

and also the number of the invoice (or document).

create cursor repeat (invoice N(1O),numcopia N(2))

for copia 0 to coples7F

insert into repeat (invoice,numcopia) values (document,copia) next

2.We create a sql-select where the ‘lines’ file is the main file and has a relation with its header through its number of document and also with the ‘repeat’ file in order to generate an exact line per copy. The results must be ordered by the element ‘numcopia’.

Select llnes.*,head_inv.*, repeat.numcopia from; lines,headjnv,repeat

where header_inv.document lines.document and;

repeat.lnvoice — document order by repeat.numcopia into cursor llistat

(Con’t, next column)

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Reporting (Con't from previous column)

3.The cursor ‘Ilistat’ is the basis to build the report.That report must be grouped by repeat. Numcopia and must skip new page foreach.

4.We state

if Iloc’Screen’

report form preview

else

report form noco to printer

endif

That’s it!.Now we have an unique ‘report’ command and Fox windows will show us the report screen telling the number of copies insted of appearing once for each copy or the command ‘report...’

I’m sure this snipet’ll help a lot of people as well as me. By the way I’m looking forward to receiving some comments to enhance it or to solve any questions to whoever has them.

(Ed. Note: Toni may be reached attmas@valser.es.]

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