Printing dynamic reports thorugh IWP

[William Keyte]

Hello fellow Filemaker experts!

I'd love to know your thoughts on this one even though I know there is already another topic that touches on it 'Printing Issues with IWP'.

I'm in the process of writing a fairly complex and fully featured school Information Management system which is going well and, in fact, quite close to completion. It organises everything to do with students, departments, teachers, classes, assessments, correspondence etc. Basically, the teacher has a 'portal' which is a separate database which acts as their 'front end' and it behaves contextually. In other words, when the teacher logs in (through directory authentication), it provides tasks to that teacher that are appropriate to them according to what level of privilege they have within the school. (teacher, Head of faculty, head of house (pastoral), Senior management etc).

Everything is working well when they use filemaker pro as a client. However, one of our customers is determined that he wants his staff always to access the system through the browser (IWP). For much of the system this is fine - most works well, and I've designed it as best I can to work through a browser. However, as we all know, printing reports (particularly those lists that require more complex summaries and breaks between groups of records) this is impossible through the browser for obvious reasons. So... (sorry for the long ramble!)..,.

Have any of you experts considered this problem more deeply and fundamentally. Is there anyway, for example, of triggering some kind of server-side activity to create the report, create a pdf and store it in a container field, for example!? Possibly very difficult. I have considered the approach of having a start script run when the data manager logs in on the back-end to create a series of 'standard' pdf reports that are then stored in a container field. Doing it this way, however, means you can't have dynamically created lists based on a particular found set/specific sort order etc. Basically, my question boils down to...

Is it possible somehow, to allow a user using the web access, a way of obtaining dynamically created lists. I wouldn't even mind if they had to 'download' the current set of records in some open format like .text or .csv but you can't 'export records' either from the browser.

Any thoughts would be hugely appreciated - thanks!

William Keyte

UK