Hello, George.

>>>Object Oriented Reports or Improvement of the Existing Report Writer – VFP strives to include a functional reporting tool.
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>First, I think it was Robert Green who indicated that if a requested feature didn't appear in the product within three versions, it was a pretty good bet that it wouldn't ever. These two requests have been made publicy (that I'm aware of) since at least prior to VFP 5.0. We're now at 7.0, three versions have come and the requests haven't been implemented.

I almost had lost any hope about OOP menus, after reading the infamous "Get a hint" words from Robert Green. But I was reading the transcript of a spanish chat that Ken and Ricardo Wenger held a couple of weeks ago in PortalFox, and when asked about OO reports by a lot of folks (as usual), Ricardo said "we are thinking about a solution for that..."

Wow! First time that somebody SO close says that.

About your arguments about the possible implementation, I have two comments:

I use a Report Class from Doug Hennig that masks the FRX file from time to time, to solve the standard header and other related problems. Also, I started using it to build reports on the fly.

I think the class is a little cumbersome to use, but this is a VFP fault, not Doug's (who made a realy impressive work).

And the FRX file structure is (somehow) simmilar to the SCX, so I don't think that it would be so hard to retrofit. Indeed, they most probably can keep supporting the old (current) format even changing the report designer.

Just imagine setting objetc properties on the Properties Windows instead of doing so in the many (different) dialogs as we do today. And of course, having some additional properties.

Just my two argentine cents (=0.02 US dollars) :)