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I agree that people who implemented _PAGETOTAL did the best they could, that doesn't mean it is the best possible - maybe if they implemented it the way I said and make the reports a bit slower, that would encourage designing fewer, smaller, and more efficient reports, and
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I'm sorry, we'll have to agree to disagree . IMHO*, whether I think _PAGETOTAL is important or not (and I've already said I don't), "the way you said" would *not* have been a better way to implement it, let alone "the best possible".

*BTW IMHO as used herein means "in my HONEST" opinion. Not humble. Honest --and fairly well informed about how many, many people use FRXs.<s>

Running the prepass would have created ridiculous results in Preview. This is NOT A PERFORMANCE ISSUE, I'm saying the results could be wrong. It also would have triggered people's UDFs multiple times and this is NOT A PERFORMANCE ISSUE EITHER.

As I said before, some people run UDFs that should not be triggered twice under any circumstances. These UDFs trigger additional events that may have nothing to do with the report. Some of them update data.

I didn't say that you don't write UDFs, Doru, just that you might not have this particular issue with your particular UDFs.

It would have been wrong for MSFT to make a unilateral decision that _PAGETOTAL was important enough to automatically run the pre-pass in the background, without giving people a choice, thus screwing up a lot of people's code. Maybe not yours, but enough people so that your suggestion is simply not a better way.

The prepass *had* to be optional and it also had to be *not* the default. Either that, or they couldn't do it.

>L<