Report Design in Visual FoxPro 3.0

This document is reprinted from the Microsoft DevCon 95 Speaker materials and is provided "as-is." This document and any associated demo files were created using Visual FoxPro 3.0. Some features discussed may have changed in Visual FoxPro 5.0.

Randy Wallin
COB System Designs, Inc

Introduction

Even in the middle of an object oriented world, the report designer’s primary purpose has not changed: to enable users to quickly and effectively produce reports that convey meaningful information based on the data stored in the data source.

Some of the things we will be covering in this session include:

Standardizing your reports:

Once you’ve created a report that you like for style and content, it would be great to save that report as a “Template” for future reports.

In FoxPro 2.x, you could create a default report with appropriate fonts, headings, logos, etc. and save it to a report called UNTITLED.FRX. Then the next time you created a report, the same defaults were applied to the new report. This 2.x tip relied on the fact that each new report would be called UNTITLED. If FoxPro found one, it would use it, otherwise one would be created.

In Visual FoxPro, the report designer does not rely on a file called UNTITLED but follows the Office standard where each new report created will have a sequential number associated with it. For example, if you start a new VFP session and create a report, the default name is REPORT1, the second report created in that session starts out as REPORT2, etc. So, how do we trick VFP to use a “Template”? Actually, it is the same process as you did in 2.x—create a report, alter all the style and content, save it as “UNTITLED”. The one difference is that you must implicitly ask for the untitled report file to be used as your template. To implement this 2.x tip in 3.0, enter: CREATE REPORT UNTITLED

Adding Label Styles to the Label Designer:

To add the standard label definitions to your resource file in FoxPro 2.x, you ran ADDLABEL.APP. In 3.0, you use the same program to accomplish the same task, with the additional ability to add custom label definitions. To add a label definition, you will need the following information:

Don’t be put off by the 1/10,000 of an inch measurements. This roughly cor-relates to 1 inch is equal to 10,000 hundredths. So from our example above where the Height of the label was 1-1/3”, you would enter 13,333 thousandths of an inch (that’s 10,000 for the inch and 3,333 for the 1/3”). Enter 40,000 thousandths of an inch to reflect the 4” width of the label.
The first two blocks of data you entered are purely informational for the end-user; the rest of the data entered is for the Addlabel application to generate the binary information to be stored in the resource file. The label designer will read this information from the resource file and create a layout for your label input. ADDLABEL.APP also stores the information in a file called LABELS.DBF. Storing the label definitions in LABELS.DBF offers a quick and easy way to restore your labels if you lose the FoxUser file for some reason.

Printer Control:

FoxPro 2.x stored the printer setup information in the fields Tag and Tag2. The information was stored as a binary blob, so programmatically you had little control over the layout, paper size, printer, etc. In 3.0, the print setup settings will be saved in an ASCII format to give you the option to change it at run-time. You’ll find the printer setup information in the TAG field of the first record of the .FRX.

Here’s a simple example of how you could code a quick printer property change in a 3.0 report.

* Program...: chngprnt.prg
* Compiler..: FoxPro 3.0
* Abstract..: Simple routine to update the tag 
*    information for print settings
* Changes...:
* 
* PARAMETERS: ReportName, Property to be changed, Change to
*
* EXAMPLE...: To insure the DRAFT Report will have Portrait Orientation
*    IF ChngPrnt("DRAFT","Orientation","Portrait")
*    ....
*    ELSE
*    WAIT WINDOW [Report not updated.]
*    ENDIF &&* ChngPrnt("DRAFT","Orientation","Portrait")
*
LPARAMETERS cReportName, cProperty, eChange

LOCAL nSelect, nRecno, nLocation, cLine, cNewLine, lText

* make sure we have an extension on the cReportName
cReportName=IIF("."$cReportName,cReportName,cReportName+".FRX")

* make sure the file exists
IF ""==LOCFILE((cReportName),"FRX","Where is "+cReportName+"?")
 RETURN .F.
ENDIF &&* ""==LOCFILE((cReportName),"FRX","Where is "+cReportName+"?")

* lText determines if we have a Text property to change
lText = (TYPE("eChange")=="C")

nSelect=SELECT()
nRecno=RECNO()

SELECT 0

USE (cReportName) AGAIN

nLocation=ATC(cProperty,TAG)

IF nLocation<>0
 * build a line to change out with the new line
 cLine=SUBSTR(TAG,nLocation)
 cLine=SUBSTR(cLine,1,AT(CHR(13),cLine))
 
 IF lText
  cNewLine=LEFT(cLine,AT([=],cLine))+["]+eChange+["]
 ELSE
  cNewLine=LEFT(cLine,AT([=],cLine))+ALLTRIM(STR(eChange))
 ENDIF &&* lText

 REPLACE TAG WITH STRTRAN(Tag,cLine,cNewLine)
ELSE
 
 IF lText
  REPLACE TAG WITH ALLTRIM(TAG)+CHR(13)+cProperty+"="+["]+eChange+["]
 ELSE
  REPLACE TAG WITH ALLTRIM(TAG)+CHR(13)+cProperty+"="+ALLTRIM(STR(eChange))
 ENDIF &&* lText

ENDIF &&* nLocation<>0
USE
SELECT (nSelect)
IF nRECNO>0
 GO nRecno
ENDIF &&* nRECNO>0

RETURN .T.
Print Preview at runtime:

One of the new options that we have with the PRINT PREVIEW is the NOWAIT option. In essence, it makes the PREVIEW modeless.

For example, REPORT FORM Customer NOWAIT will load the PREVIEW window and immediately return to the program’s control.

Printing to a File:

Under 2.x and 3.0, you can output a report to a file for later printing with the REPORT FORM <<FRXNAME>> TO FILE command. When you want to print out the report, you have two options:

COPY FILE <ReportOutput.txt> TO LPT1.PRN COPY <ReportOut.txt> PRN /B

here the /B signifies it is a binary file.

In 2.x, if you wanted to print the report to disk for later reviewing, you had several other problems to resolve: In Visual FoxPro, the report command has a new keyword: ASCII. This bypasses all of the necessary work-arounds listed above and produces a report that can be viewed later via FoxPro’s own editor.

The ASCII option in no way depends on the Generic / Text print driver or any special formatting of the report.

The new ASCII keyword works in conjunction with 2 system variables: _ASCIICOLS and _ASCIIROWS to set the width and height, respectively, of the report output. The default width is 80 characters and the default height is 63.

Happy reports using happy code:

Currently, adding code to a FoxPro 2.x report has been limited to expressions that are inserted via report variables. Within the VFP report designer, there are several different ways to incorporate code into your report: