Houston

> You've got me curious - it looks like your Fox application is "generating" the word docs. Do you store the docs for audit purposes (e.g. the underlying data can change) or some other reasons. I've always tried to rely on recreating reports rather than storing them - if the time taken to create is not considerable.

We store the documents for audit purposes because the data and the Word templates can change. An exact image of the document must be saved because they can be presented as evidence in a court of law. The Word templates are stored outside of the application and the body responsible for maintaining them can add, delete, or modify any of them without IT being aware of it. In case of a template addition, the person enters the name of the template and a brief desciption in a form and that's enough to make the system aware of the template.


> so, if your Users are editing the fabricated Word Docs - what percentage get edited? If it's a small number [and we are speaking completely hypothetically here, since the app is several years old] would it have been feasible to store only the modified Docs, and regenerate the others as needed from the source data?

About 50% of the the documents get edited when generated and 0% after thhe letter is sent. The templates on which the documents are based can change at any time (and they don't carry a revision identifier) and thus it is not easy to regenerate a document, even if we save a snapshot of the data. We do store a snapshot of the data for the reports for regeneration purposes if the template or report file is included in the EXE.


Daniel