I think I checked out MERE sometime ago as well as FRX2Any. Although, I did convince one company to buy FRX2Any I think we found it unsuitable because the PDF output would be different than the printed output where there would be different number of pages and objects positioned differently, etc. We felt that it would be problematic for our customers to be comparing report data amongst themselves where they couldn't say 'go to page 43' and they'd all see the same data no matter what format they were viewing.

Maybe in my new job it won't matter.

Does MERE work in the way described above?

And don't get me wrong because I've looked into the FRX. Sure, I can do easy things. But the positioning is just too intense.

And I'll certainly give MERE another look-see.

Jeff,

The really great thing about using MERE with VFP 9 is that the report output is rendered by the VFP 9 Report Engine and all that the MERE_ReportListener does is pass the rendered output directly into the MERE ActiveX control page by page just as it was rendered by VFP itself. You can browse through the MERE_ReportListener Class code and see that there isn't much code in the class compared to the old MindsEyeReportEngine Class. Rendering wise there won't be any differences because the VFP 9 object-assisted report engine passes the output to be rendered and its location into the RENDER Method of the ReportListener class. It would have been nice if the RENDER Method would have provided the location of Line Breaks for long stretch with overflow text. However, VFP does a great job of passing into the RENDER Method only the text to be rendered each time it fires. The MERE ActiveX control then has to calculate the line breaks based upon the width and height that the text must fit into that is also passed into the RENDER Method using GDI+ calls inside of the MERE ActiveX control.

Pagination wise, there won't be any differences between what's rendered into the MERE ActiveX control and what's rendered into the VFP 9 Report Preview because page changes are trackable in the ReportListener. When this occurs the MERE_ReportListener class calls the MERE ActiveX control's NewPageByPaperSize() Method to add a new page.

So, with VFP 9 things match up very well and you gain the advantage of speed and functionality with the MERE ActiveX control as it also has built in Email support and advanced printing support. MERE can automatically shrink to fit while printing the same as Adobe Reader when you print to a different printer than what the report was originally rendered with. Plus, it is very easy to set the Paper Bin for each and every page of a report after it has been rendered or even while the FRX is being rendered. You can even Insert or Append multiple reports into the MERE ActiveX control after rendering reports into the engine and it automatically handles the _PAGENO and _PAGETOTALS in real time inside of the ActiveX control. You can read more about this in the Help File.

So, give it a try and let me know what you think. The MindsEyeReportEngineTestForm in the FORMS folder allows you to easily compare the output between MERE and native VFP 9 by allowing you to have both previews up at once and place them side by side which is how I check things out myself to make sure rendered outputs are matching as well as reporting the time it took to render the reports using the various engines and REPORTBEHAVIOR options.