>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>Snip
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Sounds like Crystal Reports can help you out here. Each section can be an embedded subreport.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Craig -
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Have you encountered any situations where the native Report Designer was a better or more appropriate solution, or once you have Crystal Reports, can that do it all?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Sylvia
>>>>>
>>>>>I hope you will not mind if I jump here. Generally, Crystal Report is better tool, but there is issue of maintainability. Using Crystal Report you get committed to some problems (usually, not critical but still problems) when you distribute and maintain application. I mean that you will have to provide right version of Crstl.Ocx on each workstation an more important correct registration of each version. Assuming, that Crystal Report is widely used and later on or beforehand some VB developer will distribute another application with another Crystal version and so on, it can go to bumpy road. When you use native Fox report writer, you, at least, will not have this pain.
>>>>
>>>>Ed -
>>>>
>>>>Not at all. I appreciate your input. I actually ran into a similar situation when I was asked to modify a VB app for our office and one of the included .Ocx files didn't work with the updated version of VB and I couldn't find a replacement.
>>>>
>>>>My motivation in asking is that I'm running into a situation now where I want some results on a report which I can't get (leading me to rethink at least one aspect of the design) and it made me wonder if greater sophistication was available elsewhere.
>>>>
>>>>Sylvia
>>>
>>>I understand your problem. My personal preference here is following: native report writer is way to go. Basically, report design limitations can be overcome by manipulating of report cursor, certainly the more sophisticated report design is, the more complicated these manipulations are.
>>
>>Well, along those lines, let me ask you this. I have been trying today to see how much manipulation is possible of variables (either local or those defined in the report designer) to create details which are outside of what I get with a cursor. (I hope that makes sense...The cursor as it stands for the report is correct; I'm trying to get a little more blood out of the turnip:) To give you a specific example, I was trying to see if I could create a string of last names (or array if that's possible) at the detail level of the report. I was trying to do this using a report variable, but it seems like those variables are all numeric, so I couldn't get my desired results.
>>
>>As I mentioned, I had kind of re-thought the idea, but keep playing with it to see if there's a way to do this.
>>
>>Sylvia
>
>Could you include one more field into report cursor and fill it with needed data? I assume that this data is record-specific if you want to put it to detail band.

No, actually I was trying to using the detail band to try to get data for the summary band. I don't think adding another field will work. In creating the cursor, I'm in a situation where I need the detail info (so using group by won't work for me), but I also need summary info. This is probably a job for two cursors, but I'm trying to design a generic reporting class which uses one cursor.