Printing Multiple Copies 1

[ggrewe]

In VFP 7, is there a way to print multiple copies of the same report without calling the report form twice? For example, I have a cursor with 51 records and I want collated copies of the report. Right now I do the following;

for i = 1 to alen(idnumber)
   for n = 1 to number_of_copies
     report form reportname for id = idnumber[i,1] to printer noconsole
   endfor
endfor

is there a better way? Can I just do something like;

select("cursor")
report form reportname to print noconsole 2_copies

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Mike Lewis]

ggrewe,

I don't know of any better way of doing this. Calling REPORT FORM repeatedly in a loop has always worked fine for me (provided you don't add a PROMPT clause).

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My sites:
Visual FoxPro (www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk)
Crystal Reports (www.ml-crystal.com)

 

[alvechurchdata]

Our customer wanted three copies of a delivery note. I did this by having a control table to control the number of copies required. This had a single field named "Destination" with three records holding "Customer", "Despatch", and "File".

When I run the report I do a cross join between this table and the cursor driving the report:

Select source.*, control.destination ;
from source, control ;
order by source.order_id

This links every record in the destination table (all three of them) with every record in the report's cursor so that I get a new cursor holding three copies of the original cursor, one each for Customer, Despatch, and File. Ordering the cursor by order ID collates the output so that the three copies of each delivery note come out together.

Geoff Franklin

http://www.alvechurchdata.co.uk

 

[ggrewe]

Geoff, Thanks for your tip, I think this will work great. Thank you and have a good week.

 

[alvechurchdata]

Thank you and have a good week

And thank you for the shiny star. Makes a nice start to the week.

Geoff Franklin

http://www.alvechurchdata.co.uk

 

[craigsboyd]

ggrewe,

You can also open the report up as a table and go into the expr field and change the value for Copies=1 to Copies=5 or whatever.

This may or may not be a viable solution for your particular situation. If the number of copies is static, in other words you always want 5 copies or sommething then you can make the change at design time, compile and upon printing you will get 5 copies of the report.

If the number isn't static then you can still facilitate this by excluding the report from your project and including it with the application install... then when the user runs the application just allow them to select a number of copies (or however the dynamic number of copies is figured) and make the change to the report frx file just prior to running it.

Works slick either way and doesn't require undo looping structures or large redundant queries being run. Whether it is a better solution than you already have does depend alot on what your requirements are and such. Just figure it might be something to consider or keep in mind.

http://www.sweetpotatosoftware.com

 

[ramani]

nCopies = 3

_pcopies = nCopies
PRINTJOB
REPORT FORM ......
ENDPRINTJOB



____________________________________________
ramani - (Subramanian.G)

http://winnersoft.coolfreepages.com/