Koos,

>I am looking very seriously at Crystal reports and the trick with copying the tables to FP26 format seems to be a solid solution, but one of the things we consider is that we have a lot of flexibility now with the VFP reports because we always hack them in all our apps (we copy the FRX from the exe to a local file and then change fields and values and we even could add records, this way the users can have their own colors, fonts, paper size(s) etc... in the reports). Will reports from VFOX using crystal reports give that same type of functionality ? We may be able to mimic all the extra's in Crystal reports with a little work in VFOX also, but we may not be able to offer flexibility with Crystal reports, or do we ?

You can include the RPT files in your project (or add it in a binary memofield of a table which is included in your app) and copy them to a local drive at runtime and run it in very much the same way as you do with VFP reports.

The advantage of crystal reports when using either the RDC or CRPE am controller, is that you can change much of the reportproperties such as printersettings, page layout, colors, fonts, etc, at runtime trough the object model.

In the newest CR version (C 8.0) you can make your report at runtime: You can add fields, captions OLE objects or even make your own report writer. However you'll need a runtime license to distribute this functionality.

On the whole, you rarely would need the trick you do with VFP reports, because CR already offers another way to achieve the same result (for example subreports).

Walter,