DataReport

Can you use the data report object without a direct connection to a database?

I am developing in a 3-tiered environment and would like to use this tool for reporting.

If not, any suggestions?

[miletjs]

use third party reporting tools like crystal reports, etc...

Okay.

But what if my company doesn't want to shell out the money for a 3rd party control. How would you go about building a report based on strings? (this is what the middle tier sends back a long a** string that I have to parse and determine what the data is anyway...)

I'm new to VB and I guess my question is, if I have Customer 1 name and address and Customer 2 name and address and so on AND I need a report of all customers how do I go about 'placing' them on a (form/word doc/I don't know) with the correct formatting and page breaks etcetera...

[ande211]

Why do you not want to connect to a database to do the report? How else would you get to the data? Just curious.

Due to the number of potential users of this system a direct db connection for each may slow down performance. Instead the front end communicates with the database through use of middleware. When a user makes a request, the middleware parses it and it connects to the database. This middle tier manages the number of concurrent connections limiting direct hits on the db.

By parsing the request the middleware knows what command(s) to issue on the database, it then packages the response into a string and the front end takes care of display. So the front end can get a string of up to 64k back, it parses through the string and based on what delimiters are used it know if it is a first name or whatever.

I'm new to VB and am having trouble figuring out how to make this information into a report with formatting. My personal opinion is to do the reporting functions using a direct dbconnection but the project leader seems weary of straying from the 3tier architecture of the main application which enters, updates and deletes customer information.

[dmach8]

Yes its possible to bind just to an ADO recordset at runtime with a datareport..