Well, I don't know if SQL Svr has reporting functionality... (You'll have to look into that in the documentation that you have available to you.)
Within
VB though, you can do a variety of things.
Vb has Crystal Reports, a very powerful reporting system. Like all software that is powerful, it has so many capabilities that creating reports can sometimes feel like creating an application! But look into it.
Second, you can write out the data to a simple text file. Very primitive, but often enough.
Third, you can automate Word, and use Word to âbuildâ a report line-by-line, specifying font faces, character weight and slant, tabs, and so on, ultimately calling upon Wordâs printing abilities to print the result. (Plus, since it
is a document, after all, you can save it, email it, etc.)
In the last two cases, you would open a recordset of your data, and loop through it, taking the appropriate action on a row-by-row basis.
If you open a dataset, you can open several tables within it, and set their relationship. Having done that (if you have a one-to-many relationship invloved), you can move from record to record in the table on the âoneâ side of the relationship, obtain the identifying field, and use that to get the related records on the âmanyâ side. I think there is also some functionality to have the DataSet itself give only the related records from within a relationship it has knowledge of, based on the current record of the table on the âoneâ side.
Two really beneficial aspects of using Word in an automated fashion:
1. You can type a sample document in Word yourself while recording a macro, to get most of the syntax that Word needs to accomplish the look you are after.
2. Word has lable-making functionality built in, and you can utilize that to your advantage. (
I sure hate it when people say âleverageâ when they mean âutilizeâ...)
Printing
