On Section Change Event

[rhardie]

I've been over this with BO support and got my usual answer of "it can't be done", but thought I'd throw it out to the BO users. I have a report that that is more of a technical document, than a standard report. All the data is driven by a SQL Server database.

Because this report is so large (pages) I have a business need to include a Table of Contents. This TOC would be triggered on the changing values of a specific &quot;section&quot; in the report. For example the first section might be based on the value of <BookTitle>.

The second BO &quot;section&quot; would be <Chapter>. So as the value of <Chapter> changes I need to know what page of the report this occured on and also a way to store these values (<Chapter>(value) and current page number) until the last <Chapter> has been reached. Then I need to be able to display all this stored data in a Table of Contents page in the report.

Of course this TOC page would be one of the first pages of the report so if I could get and store this data, could I get the report to re-evaluate the TOC page after the data collection is complete?

The biggest obstacle I've found to my requirements, is that there are not but a hand full of &quot;Events&quot; that fire during report creation, and Section_OnChange() is not one of them.

Any ideas would be appreciated..

thx,
Russell

 

[blom0344]

I don't hold BO support in high esteem, but they may be right here. Just like most reporting tools, there is still little attention for incorporating any kind of metadata within the reports.

Creating dynamically a table of contents based on the actual structure of the report may be a step too far with the current versions.....

T. Blom
Information analyst
tbl@shimano-eu.com

 

[PAULSGS]

Have you thought about resolving this problem at a database level and writing the results to a temporary table or using a stored procedure?

 

[rhardie]

>>Have you thought about resolving this problem at a database level and writing the results to a temporary table or using a stored procedure?
<<

Yes I have. This exactly what I want to do, but the problem as I see it is there are no real usefull &quot;events&quot; behind a BO report. Most reporting tools have a &quot;Section_Format&quot; or &quot;GroupHearder_Format&quot; event and this is where I could write to a temp table the current &quot;Section Name&quot; (the database column value) and the page number the change of value occurred on. This is all the data I need for a TOC.

But as there are no such events, not possible...

But thanks for the suggestion anyway. In spite of the fact that our corporate reporting solution is Business Objects, I've thrown up the white flag and have begun evaluating other reporting tools to solve my &quot;web application&quot; reporting needs. I'm realy liking DataDynamic's ActiveReports at this time.

Thx,
Russell