Need advice on reports. An old application in OI 3.(something small) needs to move up to 8.0. Over the years they developed over 100 reports and about half are form like rather than columns and rows of data.

A searching thru this forum has lead me to believe the following: The new "banded report writer" only does rows and columns (That takes care of half of the reports); OIPI has more capabilities but requires a whole lot of code to make it happen; Then reports can be completed using other formats (PDF for example).

Can't say I look forward to writing a mountain of code to use OIPI nor have I found any source of reference material, like a user guide, that teaches what kind of code it takes to make it happen.

Going to the Adobe PDF format sounds interesting but again I can't find reference material to find out how to do it. Am I just going to end up writing a mountain of different code to go this way?

Any help or other ideas will be greatly appreciated. However, you have got to talk down to me as most of you are way over my head.

Jim Vaughan is the expert here but I'm reasonably sure he has managed to keep REPORTER working in 8.0?

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Expert may be stretching it a tad but…

I have reporter.exe running in OI 8.0, however I can not do that via a fresh install of OI 8.0.

You have to take an old version of OI (I to be honest forget how far back you have to go, when was reporter.exe support removed from OI?) and upgrade it version by version to OI 8.0.

I have a big gap between the 3.7 it is now in and the current 8.0 but all the upgrades are available on this site and I can bring it up one step at a time. But since it is no longer supported and I suppose sooner or later it won't work, shouldn't I bite the bullet and learn another way of producing the form like reports? What do you think is the best way to go? OIPI, PDF, something else?

There are multiple ways forward. There are third party utilities available to do forms and/or merges and there are the Word/OLE Mail Merge techniques we discussed in recent SENLs.

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World Leaders in all things RevSoft

A forms designer is part of the ATLAS Framework, downloadable at atlaswares.com for free. Source code is included.

If wanting to produce Adobe Forms without the OIPI code and do it fairly quickly, I would also recommend a post that Bob Carten did on 08/01/2007 regarding Adobe Forms - .fdf - works very well…

I think Bob's post of 8/1 would apply to forms to be filled in by a user rather than printing output?

Actually, you can use fdf to populate any data directly from the database. However, are you talking about reports or about forms (like an invoice, etc.)?

Not exactly an invoice but similar as portions of the form is populated by data from the database.

I can send you some information about the fdf. We are filling out pdf forms utilizing fdfs. We have forms that get filled out via a program in OI. The user just has to click a button…

Thank you I would sure like to take a look.

What is your email address?

Sorry about that, the brain was on a little vacation. That seems to be happening alot lately. I can be found more or less intact at [email protected]

Thanks again

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