Crystal Reports in Visual FoxPro

Crystal Reports in Visual FoxPro

You can also use Crystal Decisions' product, Crystal Reports, with FoxPro. Crystal Reports does a number of things that FoxPro's native report writer can't do, including

• A "real" zoom capability (any percentage of full size , up to 400%, in 1% increments )

• Data searching

• Summary to detail drill-down capability

• Subreports

• Hyperlinks

• Integrated graphing

• Exporting of the report to Excel, Word, RTF, HTML, or PDF

• Multiline header, detail, and footer bands

If any of these features are important, you can simply use Crystal Reports, which integrates perfectly with FoxPro. It costs about $500, which means that it will probably pay for itself the first day you use it. The runtime that will be needed by users of your application is royalty-free .

NOTE

The ability to include hyperlinks in your reports permits you to add a "drill-down" capability that enormously enhances summary-detail reporting. That feature alone may justify using Crystal Reports for any database application.

Reporting is a huge topic, and I've only scratched the surface. Cathy Pountney has written an excellent book on the subject ( The Visual FoxPro Report Writer , ISBN 1-930919-25-5, www.Hentzenwerke.com).