Hi,

I wonder if there is a way to allow user to select the columns that they want to see from related tables and display them on the next page whereby they can choose if they want to view as report or export search results.

i hope i don't sound too confusing. The first page is actually a search form whereby user can define their search criteria and they can choose the fields that they want to see. On clicking the search button, they will be shown the list of search results containing only the fields that they want to see. From the search result page, they can choose to view the list as a report or export it into .csv format.

Is this feasible? So far from my exploration, the exporting functions provided by FM seems to be quite limited.

In my experience, user's reporting requirements are usually quite modest; they usually only need two or three variants to meet 80% of their needs. Two or three different report options can easily be hard-ceded into the system. Any more than five or six different options becomes confusing and rapidly becomes less effective (and very expensive to develop and maintain).

It's working out what these two or three variants are that's the hard part.

Meeting that last 20% of user's needs is always the hardest, and standard practice in corporate systems IMHO is to give the users a dump of the data to play with in Excel or a reporting tool like Crystal Reports or PowerPlay. I don't necessarily think this is the right solution -- I think it shifts the burden from the developers to the end user, which is not appropriate -- but it's cost effective and generally works, especially for those once-every-five-years type of reporting questions.

Thanks for your promt reply. Will bring up these points to my boss.

How about the exporting of search results? the export function provided by FM requires the user to select the columns to export and they will print out all the records. i only need to export the found records.

You can set the script step ahead of time with options for fields, order sort, summary, FILE NAME, FILE LOCATION, etc. and then attach to a button for all found. I've got this working for data entry from three remote stations running stand-alone (secretaries and receptionists with extra time) and they email the exported files to each other, click Import (Same thing in reverse) and it updates their data set. Works great, they all see what the others have done, and we have a back-up text file on each workstation and in their emails if there's a crash. One added benny is they don't need a license but everyone is working on the 'same' set of data.