Report inheritance

envisage

Hi,

We have a situation where we would like to create base reports that all clients receive (and we may change from time-to-time). However, clients may edit their own derivations from the original report. Is there any way to create a parent-child relationship with reports files to minimise maintenance issues?

Thank you in advance,

Nathan.

gordk

Hi Nathan
alot will depend upon the approach you have taken in yor app
ie if you load files by specific filenames or from opendialogs. if you use open dialogs you can control the open and save directory props of the designer
and if you give the client the option of where to open from, and what to open.
a report template dir, a fixed report directory and a user customreport directory
it can be fairly easy.

envisage

Hi gordk,

Thanks for your reply.

The approach you have describes is how we currently deploy the app, however by inheritence I mean that we would like changes in our base reports to flow through to the derived report. For example if we found a bug in a pascalscript function contained in our base report and we deployed an update we would like derived reports to pickup this change without having to tell our users to go and change this code behind. Another example maybe a change to the formatting of a total. In the derived report, this should also change, However if the user had applied their own changes to formatting in the derived report then these should persist.

Basically we are looking for an implementation something like frame and form inheritance in Delphi.

Is this kind or inheritance available?

Thanks,

Nathan.

gordk

Possibly in the next generation ie fr4( no time frame as yet).

envisage

Thanks gordk,

I see this has been added to the list of features pinned today.
We are certainly interested in this feature - it will drastically decrease maintence issues associated with derived reports.

Can you elaborate on how far the implementation goes?

Thanks,

Nathan.