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Interrelated Information Technology

1 - Identifying the information processing requirements of the target audience.
2 - Making reports relevant to the target audience.

Our staff of system consultants support the following guidelines:

• Determine the audience. Provide a straightforward way for the audience to provide reasonable and efficient feedback on what is required in a report.
   
• Determine the purpose of a report. Ascertain from users what data is required and in what format. Once the report design has been implemented, periodically have the users assess the functionality in the database (preferably in writing) and consider incorporating their feedback into redesigning reports which will meet their evolving needs.
   
• Remain focused on the purpose of report. Do not make the mistake of allowing the scope of a successful report to grow. In most situations, it will be more effective to create separate subreports.
   
• Graphics should be selectively incorporated into a report.
   
• Clarity and simplicity is a virtue. Do not overburden a report with boilerplate, meaningless graphics, or other things that don't serve the purpose of the report.

Consider the confusion inherent in the following two formats when communicating with someone who does business internationally and asks for an item to be delivered "on 02/03/2008.":

A reasonable solution is to use MMM to indicate the month. The three upper case letters in the date format are the three-letter designation for the month. However, the mixing of alpha and numeric will not be uniformly effective method within a database or spreadsheet; this is because calculations will typically need to be performed on the dates.  In order to meet this requirement the following formats are utilized:

Our staff of system consultants supports the following guidelines:

• Use four digits for the year, not two.
• When imposing a format for data validation purposes, provide a legend for a date mask.
• When a legend is provided for a date mask, lower case letters indicate hours, minutes, and seconds:
• When using a 12-hour clock, consider going to a 24-hour time standard.

We are using an older release of Crystal Reports.  Is it worthwhile to upgrade in order to avail ourselves of the improvements in the group expert?

In release Crystal Reports 9 and above:

• An undo can be performed after a delete group.
• A group can be performed on the same field more than once. This allows a field to be used for a specified order and then within that group perform a grouping by individual values of the fields.

Earlier versions of Crystal Reports require that a formula be created which uses the group field. It then would be possible to group on the formula. In most situations, it is in the best interest to be using the latest/newest version of the software.

Example:

      Join ({?Country}, ", ") // array, delimiter

If the {?Country} parameter contains the values ["Australia", "New Zealand", "Hong Kong"] the result of this function will be "Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong".

The split function can be used to achieve the opposite result:

    taking "Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong" and returning an array.

This can then be used to pass a multi value parameter to a subreport by performing the following steps:

1) Create a formula to join the list together.

2) Link that formula to a single value string parameter in the subreport.

3) Modify the record selection formula in the subreport with the split function to:

    {Customer.Country} = split({?Pm-@Country List}, ", ")

Example:

55 NE HAGY ST, , CAMAS, ZZ, 94407-. , , , ,P , -, .

or

188/8 MVP CCD TR, , VIZ, DD 52201-. EFFECTIVE DATE: 11/21/2007. , , , ,P , -, . EFFECTIVE DATE: 11/21/2007.

This data is very confusing.  Programmatically, the requirement is to extract a single piece of data (say where the P is) always between the 8th and 9th commas. The data and lengths vary from record to record so all I have to go by are the commas.

Do you have any recommendations?

   Local NumberVar StrLoc := 1;
   Local NumberVar i;
   For i := 1 to 8 Do
   (StrLoc := InStr(StrLoc,",",{raw_data}) +1);
   If {raw_data}[StrLoc] = "P" Then
   True
   Else
   False;

   Numbervar Array MyArray := [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

In order to assign a new value to one particular element of the Array, create a formula similar to the following:

   Numbervar Array MyArray := [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
   MyArray [3] := 25

The element 3 was reassigned with the value 25.

   Redim Preserve x[n]

This function will re-dimension the array x to size n, while preserving the initial values in x. The array is x and n is a positive whole number specifying the new size of n.

I took both Visual Basic and Crystal Reports courses from SYS-ED in year's past and I require some assistance on my current assignment. In one of my report screens, the user presses a command button to generate a report. When the user presses the command button for a second time, the message will need to pop up saying "report already open." How can this be implemented?

1 - As long as the data is identical, the button should be deactivated after clicking on it. This will prevent the report from being generated more than once

2 - Another approach would be to declare a window variable and initialize it to zero. Next place a check on the value of this variable. If the value is zero the report should be generated. After the report is
    generated/shown add 1 to the variable. This means that when the value is checked, the code that generates the report will not run.

Do SYS-ED's Crystal Report courses teach the Repository?

The Repository was updated in version 10 in order to create a managed system for report design and maintenance. Repository objects can be secured and shared through Crystal Enterprise and are made available through the Crystal Reports designer.