Chapter 6 -- Creating Reports

Chapter 6

Your understanding of forms from the previous chapter will serve you well as you consider how to use reports in your applications. Although reports do not support interactive controls, you can populate reports with controls that display data, such as text boxes and check boxes. Reports can also contain bound and unbound graphic images and ActiveX controls for special displays, such as charts. The report charting capability in Microsoft Access 2000 behaves much like the one for forms.

This chapter explores some pragmatic design and display issues for reports. It also covers programming for dynamic content in a report as well as the enumeration and manipulation of reports and their controls. The chapter presents a case study of a Microsoft FrontPage guestbook that addresses the typical small business and departmental needs that Access often serves. Two more sections demonstrate report design issues. Another short section explores presenting Access reports via its snapshot file format. This format makes it easy to share Access reports through email and over the web even on workstations that do not have Access installed. The chapter closes with three sections that demonstrate specific programmatic issues. The first two deal with dynamic content on a report. The final section explores the programmatic manipulation of reports and their controls. This last section illustrates techniques for processing different types of AccessObject objects, such as members of the AllReports and AllForms collections.