>What I'm interested in is how the users choose the filtering criteria.
>1) Does it have to do with how the report is designed in crystal? Meaning, they can change the values of the parameters in the filter but not actual apply a whole new filter.
>2) Or can you apply any filter condition (meaning create at viewing time) to the canned report.

Shawn,

I apologize for the delay in responding to you. I've been on vacation in Europe for a couple of weeks (woohoo!) and just catching up on the work that has piled up in the meantime. :)

For the criteria selection, we're making use of a 3rd party tool called Query Maker which basically has a wizard-like interface for stepping users through building selection and/or sorting preferences. Query Maker comes with field dictionary tables that need to be populated. At runtime I present the user with a list of fields that they can choose from to use in the criteria and let Query Maker build the actual filter string that I append to the SELECT statement that I pass to the Crystal Report Object's SQLQueryString property.

For sorting/totaling, I already have a max of 10 group footers defined in the template that are suppressed. If the user decides to subtotal on a field, I unsuppress the footer and change the grouping field condition to be what the user has chosen.

I generally don't use Crystal's parameter fields that much.. only in a couple of specific situations. Otherwise, I just manipulate formula fields directly from within VFP code and the report itself then uses those formula field values for its purposes.

I hope this was somewhat helpful. Let me know!

Laterness,
Jon