>>Richard,
>>
>>The one-with-the-fox way of doing things is to use vioews and queries to build the data for the report, then the report has one thing in its DE and it does not use filters or multiple tables or anything else complicated. The report just walks through one cursor and prints the data.
>>
>>Think of it this way, the report is for formatting the output (period), nothing else. The views, cursors, queries and such are for manipulating data. Let the data manipulation stuff go and get the data and let the report format the output.
>>
>>The same is true for forms as well.
>
>That sounds good for fairly simple reports, but how do you use this method for more complex situations.
>
>I am thinking of reports that are not just simple views of existing tables, but are the final result of processing that creates temporary cursors which hold the results. The temporary cursors may then be related to many other tables.

For very complex data processes, I tend to minimize my 'working' cursor to include only the fields that are being calculated or directly manipulated. Then I use relations to primary key values in 'lookup' tables for supporting data that must be in the report. If I cannot get to the supporting data with a primary key value, then the data is added during processing to the cursor.
Just another POV.