Splitting a report into multiple archive entryes in DB - Possible ??

rbuser

Can anybody tell me if this is possible, and if so, how.
Senario:
I have a report that generate letters to many customers. (grouped by
customer nr.). The report prints out every letter to a printer in one spool
job (I hope to avoid generating one spool job pr customer). At the same time
Each letter (page) is to be saved as an archive(file) in a db. Later I can
then go to a spesific customer, look at letters to this customer, and read
one spesific letter from the archive.

Thanks
Trond.

rbuser

Sorry, The environment is: Delphi7, RB 7.0 Enterprise

Trond

digitalmetaphors

The easy part will be printing all customers as one print job. Use one
TppReport and run it over all the customer data. Call Report.Print.

The TppDBArchiveDevice is on the todo list. So, we have to use an alternate
method. The way to send different customer letter as archives to a db, will
be to stream the archive files individually as blobs to a database. First,
you need N customer letter archives as separate files. I would run the
report, but not connect it to any devices in order to cache the pages in
memory on the report (Report.CachePages = true). Then you can use a
TppArchiveDevice to recieve pages manually so that you can create an archive
file for each customer. The code would be something similar to:

ppArchiveDevice: TppArchiveDevice;

ppArchiveDevice.Publisher := ppReport1.Publisher;
ppArchiveDevice.PageRequest.PageSetting := psSinglePage;

for liIndex := 1 to MyCustomerRecordCount do
begin

ppArchiveDevice.FileName := 'Customer' + IntToStr(liIndex);
ppArchiveDevice.StartJob;
ppArchiveDevice.PageRequest.PageRequested := liIndex;
ppArchiveDevice.ReceivePage(ppReport1.Publisher.Pages[liIndex - 1]);
ppArchveDevice.EndJob;

end;

Then you have N letter archive files. Now you can use the main reports demo
#155 to stream the archive files to the database and then use the
TppDBArchiveReader component to view the different archives.

Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors