[AccessD] report grouping on the fly?

Hi Roz

Perhaps you can leave all this to DBxtra:

  www.dbxtra.com 

/gustav

>>> roz.clarke at donnslaw.co.uk 08-03-2005 18:03:32 >>>
Dear all

My colleague Tom and I are working on a reporting tool. The principles
are
borrowed from Steve Nyberg's very lovely RFil. (Wih a quite
astonishing
amount of fiddle to get 

We are finding that the demand for bespoke report 'templates' (i.e.
pre-created reports that they can then set criteria against) is
outstripping
our ability to provide them, because users constantly want different
sorting
and grouping. 

Has anyone ever built anything that created group headers & footers on
the
fly? I am trying to conceptualize it but it seems like a big task.

Thinking aloud here - I can see that we need to limit the options
presented
to the user. They will have little understanding of the data or the
principles of data interrogation. So we will need to determine which
grouping functions to make available and which report fields each
function
can apply to.

We will then need to create the appropriate report sections and
populate
them with controls, nicely positioned, suitably formatted and
containing the
correct data binding / grouping function.

I think positioning them will turn out to be the hardest part; it's
such a
visual task when you put total controls on manually.

Any thoughts or advice would be welcome

Cheers

Roz