Agreed. The report designer has not grown with the rest of the product. Some workarounds to your problems.

1) You can quickly create a single record table and use that for the report. Or have a single record table sitting around just for this purpose. But... To give you a neater solution to you problem of the users faxing error report, instead have your system send you an email when an error occurs. wwipstuff is a great tool for this. Even in this case (of an error) wouldn't have be printing data from an error log so you would have at least 1 record to print.

2) You can create a dummy field that you use to group records of a different type on.

You probably have already consider these.

I wonder when and if we are going to get a better report designer from the FoxTeam, or will we have to reply on Crystal reports or another 3rd party tool?


>Sometimes I bump into 2 limits (I think) with the FP reportdesigner :
>1. the reportdesigner is recordbased
>2. the reportdesigner is based on only one recordset
>
>Let me explain what I mean :
>
>1. recordbased : you need at least one record before the report wants to print or in other words, the detail band prints for each records, so no records, no detail band, and no detail band no header, no title, no footer no nothing. If you want to print a form that isn't based on a table/view/cursor/ etc you must invent some tricks before you can do. Example : I want to print a page when an error occurs in the program, that the user can fax, so I can examine the error. I first have to put the data I want to print in a cursor before I can print ...
>
>2. based on only one recordset : suppose you need to print a report with some records of table 1, some records of table 2, and finally some records of table 3. The 3 tables aren't related to each other in any way. Before in FP dos I knew some tricks to do this, and for one case I found a trick in VFP, but there's no generic solutioin for this problem afaik. Example : an invoice which contains products with diff. VAT rates. At the end of the invoice, you have to print for each VAT rate a totalline. For this I found a workaround with arrays built in the pre and post processing for a band, but this works only for a limited number of lines ; if the number of VAT rates would be unlimited and/or unknown, this wouldn't be a solution.
>
>How do you solve these problems ? Comments ? I thought I read here on UT, for microsoft, the reportdesigner isn't a priority as a reportdesigner doesn't fit into the position where MS wants to situate VFP ...