SET REPORTBEHAVIOR 90
automatically turns on the new built-in preview app included with Visual FoxPro 9 with better zoom features, multiple pages and more. It's an XBase app so you can customize it yourself.
Goals: there were many , including the need to protect existing FRX investments
But Three key areas were changed:
Engine
Designer
Output
Both with features you can use immediately and others that are more extensible.
Engine can now handle multiple detail bands.
Designer now sports easier to use dialogs and is more extensible and have access to Report Protection.
Output - much more options
The new designer now works better for multiple character sets (multiple languages on a single report), right-alignment (no jaggies), better image resolution. The Preview now matches what's printed (thanks to GDI+).
Now you can actually use GDI+ to manipulate the output.
Multiple Detail Bands means that you can have one report with multiple detail bands. The detail bands link to each child alias in the Data Environment and then when they run on the report, you only get the data from each one. You can also go through the same data twice to do "pre-calculations" in one pass and then display it in another pass.
The Report Protection feature will let you lock aspects of the report designer so that users can only modify the parts of the report you want them to.
The new ReportListener lets you chain reports together so you can print (and preview) two reports together so they appear as one.
Exporting to HTML is now directly supported with the new ReportListener, including images (which are stored to a separate file).
The Report Listener can be subclassed so you can do cool things like highlighting individual text based on its value (without having to create multiple objects)
More details on the Report Writer are available from Cathy Poutney's whitepapers found (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnfoxgen9/html/VFP9Reports1.asp and http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnfoxgen9/html/VFP9Reports2.asp)
as well as all the great sessions here at DevCon on the report writer.
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