Reporting with dBASE Plus

Reporting with dBASE Plus:
A Tutorial

Michael Nuwer
October 28, 2002

Reporting IX
Further Readings

Goals and Objectives

The goals for this Session are:

To give credit where it is due;
To provide a list of further readings;

Additional Resources

The two most useful documents that deal with the dBASE reporting are in the dBASE Knowledgebase. Beyond these, there are not many documents that focus on reporting. The only other documents I've found are in the dBASE Developers Bulletin, and are listed here.

Beginning Reports by Ken Mayer
Tricks With Reports and Labels by Ken Mayer
Multi-Table Datamodule Reports: A Primer by Michael Joyce
Example of Preview.wfm and Report Parameters by Steve Hawkins

Marko Mihorko inspired most of the reporting examples used in this tutorial. He commonly posts "turn-key" examples in the dBASE newsgroups. The following is a list of the examples used in this Tutorial

Re: Problems with footer info (Tue, 25 Sep 2001)
Re: OLE from WORD text in Report (Thu, 13 Sep 2001)
Re: Case Sensitive Text (Wed, 5 Sep 2001)
Re: Case Sensitive Text (Thu, 6 Sep 2001)
Re: Printing a report between two dates (Tue, 24 Oct 2000)
Re: Sum calculated field (Wed, 11 Apr 2001)
Re: referencing calculated fields in a report (Wed, 14 Mar 2001)
Re: Step-by-Step Reports for Knowledgebase ((Wed, 24 Oct 2001)
Re: agCount (Sat, 20 Jan 2001)
Re: Totals and Averages (Mon, 8 Jul 2002)
Re: Total at and of page in report (Thu, 12 Apr 2001)
Re: OnRender() question (Wed, 14 Feb 2001)
Re: Making group headers visible (Sat, 28 Apr 2001)
Re: Making group headers visible (Mon, 30 Apr 2001)
Re: Some guidence please :) (Mon, 18 Jun 2001)
Re: print large text block in 2 columns per page (Thu, 28 Jun 2001)
Re: suppressifblank (Thu, 26 Jul 2001)
Re: Keeping Children together (Sat, 29 Sep 2001)
Re: 2 pages report (Sun, 13 Jan 2002)
Re: Columnar report with multiple pages (Mon, 27 May 2002)

Vic's Printer Class

Vic McClung wrote a printer class that is very popular among dBASE users. Although some dBASE developers create all their reports with this class, others use it in combination with the dBASE report designer. Paul Frank, a member of the dBVIPS, explains the two systems.

The dB2K Report Writer/Report Class is a 'data tool' designed to present table-derived data and various 'arithmetic summaries' of data in printed format. It does a pretty good job of handling and summarizing the data, but it has limited ability when it comes to printing non-data or abstract material derived from data.

Vic McClung's Printer Class is a 'print tool' designed to print almost anything at any position on the finished page, and it is extremely good at it - providing you know how to specify the output. However, it has absolutely no built-in data or table processing functionality, and the user must define and program all output before sending it to print.

IOW [In other words], for most reports presenting a traditional summary of one or more tables, the dB2K report designer is the tool of choice. If the report designer can't handle the required layout Vic's class may offer a solution, but the trade-off is that your program will need to determine the content and position of every object to be printed.

There are a few good documents that cover how to use Vic's Printer Class.

Quick 'n easy intro to Vic McClung's Printer/Preview Class by David Stone.
Printing in Visual dBASE with Vic McClung's Printer Class by Vic McClung
Printing Lines, Boxes and Images with the Printer/Preview Class by Vic McClung

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The Legal Stuff: This document is part of the dBASE Reporting Tutorial created by Michael Nuwer. This material is copyright © 2002, by Michael Nuwer. dBASE, dBASE Plus, dBASE SE, and dB2K are copyrighted, trademarked, etc., by dBASE, Inc., the BDE (Borland Database Engine) and BDE Administrator are copyrighted, trademarked and all that by Borland, International. This document may not be posted elsewhere without the explicit permission of the author, who retains all rights to the document.