We have been working with the new report features in VFP9 and run into some problems that makes us curious why no one has mentioned up to this point. The problem is speed... or I should say, the lack of it when using SET REPORTBEHAVIOR TO 90 compared to the 80 setting.

We have an application that we use to track our users. It also prints upgrade order blanks at the end of the year when we issue new updates for our software. For testing purposes, we printed 250 upgrade order blanks. It took over 284.469 seconds to dump this report to the print queue. This is the time that the progress bar that VFP generates is on the screen. If you look in the print queue, the printjob is 1.66 gig. No wonder it takes so long.

Using 80 report behavior, it took .901 seconds to dump to the print queue and the file size was 3.21 MB.

This doesn't begin to address the problem of how slowly the printer can process the printjob. In 80 the pages flow out of the printer without any delay at all. In 90, there is perhaps a 20-30 second delay between pages.

Although we can't post our user-tracking application, we have prepared a sample prg that uses the Northwind customer file that will demonstrate what we are talking about. Although the diffence in the 3 page report is not significant (on our computers it's only a few seconds), when you generate a realworld report with a couple hundred pages, you begin to see why the 90 report behavior is unacceptable in spite of the benefits it might offer.

I'd be interested to know if others are experiencing this also.

Here is the link...

www.proware-cpa.biz/vfp9report_test/rpt_sample.zip