Southwest Fox - Day 2, Session 5

Cathy Pountney - OutFox the VFP Report Writer: Printing on My Terms

I missed this session at DAFUG where it received great accolades. So here I am with great expectations.

Cathy gave us a great illustration of how the reporting pieces work together. She showed that the report engine is still out of our control, but the report listener, preview container and extension handler are all in our control.

Cathy started out showing us several really desirable reporting output options like 2-up or 4-up, shrink-to-fit, booklets, portrait or landscape with a single FRX... wow, I'm pretty excited. She says she's going to show us how to do all this with no changes to our reports. I can't wait.

OK, now she says we're going to do this all with API calls - and wait for it - it is easy? We'll see. :)

Wow, this is very impressive stuff. Cathy has written a fair amount of code (that the attendees get) that really does make this easy. She's done all the heavy lifting and has written methods that basically trick (repeatedly) the report engine into thinking the paper is one size or another to get the report generated the way she wants and then sets everything back after the report is generated and before it is actually sent to the printer. Sometimes she's playing with orientation, sometimes page size, sometimes the order of the pages, sometimes some other magic.

This is all very slick.

All these examples went straight the printer (or in this case, the PDF generator on Cathy's machine.) So next she showed us how to see these results in the Preview using an Extension Handler.

She spent some time showing us some of the properties of the PreviewForm like AllowPrintFromPreview which when set to .f. doesn't allow the user to print from the preview window.

This session really rocked! If you're not here - get your user group to get Cathy to come do this session. If you are here - make sure you see this the next time around.

Oh, and by the way- Cathy said this was all easy right? Well it will be for us because she's worked through all the really hard stuff.