report object missing

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Kresten Bjerg <Kresten.Bjerg at psy.ku.dk> wrote:
> Hi
> Its fine, if Jan Schenkel can make a buisiness out
> of selling the report-options in improved,
> professional versions. 130 Dollars I think, for the
> cheapest way.  But I an just looking for an element,
> an object type,( "report object") which is described
> in the documentation to be found in the  Object, new
> control panel, but is missing there, but necessary ,
> if one shall follow the instructions to produce a
> layout card, to implement the revReportSetup (which
> is present).
> A posting says it is "deprecated"....?  whatever
> that means.  I guess all I need is one exemplary
> "report object", or a description of, whether an
> ordinary field can be used as such an object, also
> if it is going to refer to whole cards in a multiple
> cards to a page- solution
> As I am working on producing a freeware tool
> standalone, and without any profit, it seems strange
> if one shall have to pay for what the IDE promises
> to contain.
> Kresten
> 

Hi Kresten,

The 'report object' is deprecated in the sense that it
has disappeared from the tools palette, and the menu
structure. When it was introduced in Revolution 2.0,
there was no real documentation for it, so I spent
quite some time trying to make it work for me.

Unfortunately, it suffered from a number of issues and
was removed in version 2.5, as the RunRev team decided
it was better to remove features that didn't reach
their full potential and would require a significant
amount of resources to finish properly. 

RunRev Ltd has limited resources, and has to take
tough decisions on what items to spend these on -- I'm
sure they wish they had a few clones of Mark
Waddingham to make things move faster...

Their decision was also inspired by my work on Quartam
Reports -- they felt that it would benefit everyone to
let a third party move into this territory with a
professional solution.

Quartam Reports was written in 100% Transcript, but is
not based on the original 'report object' that came
with Rev 2.0 -- it started from a database-oriented
view close to FoxPro and FileMaker Pro reporting.

I'm sorry to hear it doesn't fit in your budget. On
the other hand, you have several options to produce
reports from Revolution:

- export the report as an HTML file by filling a
template html text that you created with the data ;
your user can then print the report from their
favorite web browser, but formatting is not that
precise

- export the report as an RTF file in roughly the same
manner ; this gives you better formatting options, but
your users will need Word or Pages to print the report

- layout a template stack with fields and graphics,
then fill the fields with the data from your app and
print the report template stack

Hope this helped,

Jan Schenkel.

Quartam Reports for Revolution
<http://www.quartam.com>

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)

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