On Sunday 14 March 2004 10:17 am, Will Leshner wrote: > What kind of features are you looking for in such a report writer?
My program is a membership management database. The db has a list of people, with various information about them distributed over several tables. For example, the 'people' table has the basic information that most people have (name, address, spouse name, 'flags'). The 'phones' has phone numbers, phone type and id which points back to the people db. Same with the 'emails' and 'notes' tables. Of course, there are other tables as well, but these are the ones to be concerned with at present. In my scenario, I have two basic reports that need to be handled: a 'list' and a 'detail'. A 'list' is just like it sounds: a listing of people. It might have various amounts of data from other tables, depending on what's needed. 'detail' is also just like it sounds: a dump of a particular person's data. This one is probably ok to hard-code (which is what I am doing now). The request I keep getting is for the user of the db to be able to create arbitrary reports. I need to find out exactly how far that goes; but the idea might be they want to be able to see only people with emails, and display name and email only. The program I wrote allows the user to create 'filtered' lists, which are quite sophisticated -- but the only two reports I allow at present are a 'list' containing name, addr, phone and a detail which has all the information. I'm looking to see if anyone has a more generic solution I could put into my program to allow my users some flexibility. At this point, *any* flexibility would make them happy... Thanks for any pointers, Ron -- My GPG public key is at http://ronware.gotdns.com/ fingerprint: 4E91 06E9 2020 114C 8BCD 55B2 0816 60AF 2B3D 4C51 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
