>>I've been using Rich Simpson's Minds Eye Report Engine for creating PDF reports. I have a client that needs to release a product that has some reports that this tool just can't handle at this time. I'm looking for a tool that can combine multiple reports into a single PDF and is free or fairly inexpensive. Any suggestions?

>I don't understand what Rich's control can not handle. I do know you can combine multiple VFP reports into a single output in his control, even reports of different orientations.

Mark,

On Thursday night Barb emailed me at 8:06PM my time about a problem when running a Landscape Report followed by a Portrait report. I emailed her back by 8:40PM and told her that I would look into it and also gave her some hints on how to make the report launch modally by calling the oRPT.SHOW(1). I chased down the problem and sent her a fix on Friday night by having her add two lines of VFP code to get around the issue that synched the page sizes back up when the engine was set to ProcessInBackground. Albeit, it was 11:45PM my time. I found that my OCX engine was not using the new page height internally for the Portrait mode when the AppendReportToObject() Method was called because the ProcessInBackground Flag was set to TRUE which improves speed by telling the OCX not to repaint the pages as I am adding data onto them. So, the engine was thinking that I still only had 8.5 inches of vertical height on the page. So, that fixed that problem.

Barb added the fix on Saturday and sent me an email at 10:11PM telling me that the fix I sent her worked for the Page Height. However, when running another report that had a GROUP FOOTER using the AppendReportToObject() Method, the appended report was not painting the GROUP FOOTERS. I didn't actually see her email until about 11:40PM because I had turned off my email while I was coding. So, I emailed her back enquiring as to what the report order was and said I would get her a fix on Sunday since I was too tired to chase it down that night. So, after tracking the problem down I emailed her Sunday evening with a fix for the problem which was simply to rename the call in the AppendReportToObject() Method to the newer ReportEngine() Method from the older one. This fixed the problem in my testing and I emailed her a PDF containing all of the reports displaying as they should have with the newer method name. I simply missed changing it in the AppendReportToObject() Method. It was working fine in the ReportFormObject() Method. The older method did not call the GROUP FOOTERS individually which was required in the newer engine since I made the change to support all of the OnEntry and OnExit Events of the Report Bands.

I tried to respond to her as quickly as I could on the fixes as soon as I knew about them. I would have tracked them down at Whilfest if I knew they were a problem. However, I understand that she has had a frustrating time with me trying to get some reports to run with all of the VFP Report Writer work around tricks that she employs. Trust me I have spent hundreds of hours working on ways to pick up on them and make those tricks work in my report engine. There are some fixes though that can take a long time when rewriting the internal engine to add improved support for the Band Events, etc. But when I get frustrated and am pulling my hair out over how to make things work sometimes, I take a break and add in some of the features on my To Do List that I know I can do quickly and easily just to rebuild my confidence in what I am doing. <g> I have still been working on improved STRETCH WITH OVERFLOW support for really long memos that are stacked and flow over multiple pages. So, that is an issue on some of her other reports.

So, thanks for pointing out that I do append multiple reports of different orientations into a single report. I worked hard on that feature off the get go so that a single report could have multiple page sizes and orientations all in a single preview window and Print them as well that way on the fly. I think all of the alternative Report Engines out there now have been helping to build competition and make for better products from all of us.