Generating Reports From Multiple Tables

[aaxou]

Dear all,

I have been through the forum, and I have realised that printing portals isn't great (in my case I have blank fields and can't get the correct headline).

My parent table includes 2 portals with data from 2 DIFFERENT tables.

I have tried the following approaches:

Solution 1: Print the portals:

Advantage: I am able to print only the populated lines of the portal, and it shows exactly the data I want

Inconvenient: It is very space consuming as the portal lines won't resize. As much as possible, I want my report to stay on one page.

Solution 2: Import the related records into a new Print_Table and create a report from this table using Part (Sub-Summary). (I got that tip from this website, in the "Generating Reports from Multiple Tables"/Resources.

Advantage: I print only the populated lines of the portals.

Inconvenient: The layout is very constrained by the sub-summary part (for example, I wanted to have information in the margin, but I had to move it to the heather). I can't get the correct headings for my tables (as they don't hold the same data). As I have imported the 2 tables into 1, I have a lot of blank lines.

To make this easier to understand:

Table 1 contains Field 1, Field 2, Field 3, Flag

Table 2 contains Field 4, Field 5, Field 6, Flag

Print_Table contains Fields 1 to 6 and Flag.

I then created a sub-summary based on Flag.

It would be really helpful if someone either had a quick fix to resize the portal lines (solution 1), or could detail the few steps I need to overcome inconvenient in Solution 2.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help,

Axelle

[David McQueen]

Perhaps a third solution for you:

Create the report part(s) for each table separately, going back and forth between tables as much as required. One part could be a list view where another is a page view and another is a portal as required.

Script the report creation such that it goes to table one, prints that part of the report to a pdf, goes the the next table and prints that part of the report - appending it to the existing pdf....and so on and so on till the total report is composed as one pdf.

I used an approach similar to this for appraisal reports where the user wanted to be able to set the order in which the various forms printed at will. Depending on how your report is structured this may or may not be helpful.

[Ocean West]

Best option would be to employ the Virtual List Technique where you can grab the array of related id's in Table 1 AND Table 2 and the virtual list table will reference the data needed to print the merged data.

There are many topics regarding virtual lists.

[aaxou]

David, Ocean West, thanks for your comments.

I have read about Virtual Lists, it seems a very powerful tool, I understand the concept but would need a bit of help to see how to build one. But I can't find anything on the internet about this. Any links you can recommend?

David, I did look into merging different reports, but dismissed this idea as I saw that appending PDF reports could only be done on different pages. My reports are (usually) quite short, and should fit on one page if possible.

Thanks again.

[Lee Smith]

Go to this site FileMaker hacks and do a search for value lists. Kevin Frank and Bruce Robinson have written several articles about these lists.

HTH

Lee