Custom Report Dialogs

rbuser

Hi,

Just curious, but are there plans in future editions of RB to increase the
functionality for prompting the end-user for report data? I know all about
AutoSearch, but I've found it 1) a little clunky looking to the end user 2)
is not easy to pass variables to your SQL and report variables, and 3) would
really benefit from a small "dialog builder" type of feature. RB is one
heck of a great product, but this just seems to be the 1 area that is a
little hard to get around in -- especially without doing a lot of custom
code. Not sure if you've seen what FastReport does for dialogs, but it's a
pretty slick solution (although you guys are hands down winners in all other
areas). We're trying to make a decision for a future path of building user
interfaces for our customers and knowing this is something you might already
be looking at expanding would be helpful.

Thanks,

Rhett Price
IndySoft

digitalmetaphors

Thankyou for the suggestions! We don't have any plans at this time to create
a dialog builder feature, but I'll add this to the "Requested Feature" list.

Autosearch is a powerful solution. You can create a descendent from the
ancestor autosearch form as shown in this demo to do custom lookups to help
the user out. Yes, it does require some code on your part.

If you want to show a dialog to provide data for the report, you'll have to
code the dialog and show it before the report prints. One way to provide the
data is to create a JITPipeline in order to surface the user's entered data.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors