Dear Tevye:

Do your systems work off of a SQL backend or VFP? If you use SQL, have your found Foxfire up to the task? How does it handle the cursor or recordsets that are returned?

Regards,

Jim Smith
>>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
>
>I have been recommending FoxFire to clients for many years. Most of the users I work with are sales and marketing oriented and have a requirement to get timely reports from their sales data. They are trained to create their own simple reports in Foxfire.
>
>Usually if the report requires any sophistication I will create the report for the client. If the client wants to modify the report in any way I recommend that the client make a copy of this report (which is an easy thing to do in FoxFire), modify it, and save the new report. They can modify the fields selected, the order of the columns, the sort order and filter.
>
>One of the beauties of FoxFire is that the user just has to pick a previously created report from a list and run it. They have the option at run-time to modify the filter criteria for the report. This way one report can be created that may be used by many people, departments, etc.
>
>Many programmers I have talked to do not see the benefit of using FoxFire. There is a learning curve but I found it well worth it. I have never had a client run custom reports from FoxFire that didn't love it. Usually the client can get better value by using FoxFire over my building reports manually. Since my goal is to provide value for the customer I have never had a problem recommending FoxFire.