Dear Wally:

Thanks for your thoughts. Foxfire is exactly as you described and is similar to the Stonefield Report package we used in FPW 2.6. Many of our users would never create a report but they like to edit things like grouping, sorting, filters, etc. This seems to be the biggest value of a Foxfire type tool.

We may end up going with Crystal Reports as our main report engine but the grouping, sorting , filter issues will still be there.

Regards,

Jim Smith
>James,
>
>I am not a FoxFire user. However, about 5 years ago I thought that my client might benefit from it, so I recommended they buy it. They bought it. I spent several hours fooling with it. I did not use it after that. I accomplished everything the client wanted without FoxFire.
>
>FoxFire is merely a user interface that fits between the programmer and the report designer. To me such tools merely get in the way. I would rather do the work myself than a wizard. FoxFire is liked by some people though. I think it allows non-programmers and semi-programmers to make reports. They like to do that. If your clients want to be able to design custom reports and pick all the fields themselves, then FoxFire can be very good according to my limited impression of it.
>
>But if your client doesn't want to make reports, if you make all the reports, then in my opinion it is better to just learn to do it yourself because you can do much better than the wizard and the wizard will not do it exactly as you please.
>
>Wally