Reports - one more time

[Brad Allen]

Nine to Five Software made a fantastic report generating tool for 
HyperCard, called Reports Datapro. I don't know if they're still in 
business, but a tool similar to that would be great for Revolution.

Reports had a section-oriented layout tool, with sections for break 
summaries, sub-summaries, grand summaries, headers, footers, and a 
main body. It had a sort and select tool which acted on a HyperCard 
stack in a way similar to flat file databases. The report generation 
could be controlled by scripts, and as the report generated, messages 
flowed up the message hierarchy to provide strong scripted control of 
report generation. It was a nice tool.

Unfortunately, report generation was a tiny sub-nice market in the 
already small market of HyperCard developers. I doubt Nine to Five 
software made much money on their product. If anyone wanted to create 
a similar product for Revolution, they'd face a similar financial 
obstacle.

However, since Rev can communicate with external databases, the 
reporting tools for those databases are available to Rev.


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