In addition to what Ken has already indicated, I wanted to clarify our Europa Reporting design goals a bit here since you mentioned backwards-compatibility. Our desire is to maintain the same FRX structure for Europa as with VFP8, but with good improvements (e.g., preserving meta content such as the User field). You will be able to take a VFP8 report and run it unchanged in Europa. Additionally, you should be able to run many Europa reports in VFP8 (however, you run risk of wiping out new enhanced support if you resave that report in VFP8). As for Protection, the protection setting for an item in an FRX (whether it be a field label or band) will be honored when someone issues a MODIFY REPORT ... PROTECTED command.

Folks have asked if we will be supporting new OOP Reports similar to our current Class model. The answer is not exactly (in fact, I would think of our new model as being closer to that of an advanced form of Project Hooks). While total OOP reports was an option we seriously considered, an important message we received from almost all folks we consulted with was to "preserve my investment in existing FRXs". We know a lot of you have 100s or more existing reports that you will want to use when you migrate your apps over to Europa. Our new model will now give you access to your reports at runtime via object-oriented syntax. For example, you could have code that tells a calculated field to render its ForeColor “red” if the value is negative. The new model also allows for existing FRXs to be output to different formats (e.g., XML, RTF, PDF, etc.). The specific formats that we will support in the box are still being determined, but the open architecture model easily allows someone to plug-in a new format renderer for ones we don’t include. Additionally, you will also be able to plug-in your own custom Print Previewer.

Essentially, we are providing a *very* open architecture for Europa Reporting that is quite modular in nature. We feel that this allows for maximum VFP reporting flexibility going forward as new technologies and formats emerge. We’ll have more to say on Europa Reporting over the next few months.

Randy


>>Europa News from the Visual FoxPro Team
>>http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/letters/
>>Get the latest updates from Ken Levy on the next version of Visual FoxPro code named Europa as well as news about Visual FoxPro DevCon 2004.
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>Hi Ken,
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>Is "Ability to set design-time protection at run time" backwards?
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>Otherwise, it looks very impressive!