We currently have approximately 100 sites using our software (VFP 6) which has an adhoc report builder and several pre built reports for each site. The reports are of course built off a set of data dictionaries and I was just informed by my boss that a conservative guess is 4-5000 reports at all the sites.

I am still testing a third party tool. (APOS docassist) It is supposed to document the reports in a detailed set of tables in an access database. If it provides enough detail we may be able to use it to document, then rebuild the reports in vers 10 using VFP.

I read the CrysDev book, chapters 9-11, concerning the RDC ( Report Designer Component ), in vers 9. (the Craig Berntson book). It appears from my short look at the book that we could build crystal reports in VFP programmatically. Although it does not look very easy. Since our reports are in vers 7 with a data dictionary we may also be able to open them in vers 9 which supported the data dictionary if you downloaded the necessary components, and then using VFP we could programmtically change their data sources, rather than build them from scratch from information from a third party tool.

Either way it would seem feasible to rebuild the reports programmatically as opposed to opening each of the 5000 reports and manually changing them or worse still having to manually build each report again!

Has anyone actually tried to rebuild a set of reports this way or am I attempting to prove the world is not FLAT?


Mike