Our November 2003 GRAFUG Meeting went very well .. and like usual .. we ran over our 2 hour scheduled time. I had to leave before the final ending so this recap doesn’t include any final words!!
Thanks to Jan Wells for bringing the donuts!!
We had a lot of discussions before our main presentation!!
Conferences
Essential Fox, June 4-7, Kansas City, Missouri
DevTeach, June 19-22, Montreal, Canada
Advisor DevCon, Sept 29 – Oct 2, Las Vegas, Nevada
GLGDW is sort of up in the air for 2004. Whil Hentzen may not do a FoxPro conference and may decide to do a Linux conference instead. As many already know, his focus is more on Linux than FoxPro these days.
Visual FoxPro Releases
SP1 is available for VFP 8.
Microsoft has stated that VFP 9 will be ready to ship in the 2nd half of 2004.
SQL Server / .NET
Someone asked about SQL Server and .NET training and that started a long conversation. Currently, Kevin McNeish of Oak Leaf offers a .NET for VFP Developers course. I’ve heard that Jim Duffy of TakeNote Technologies is putting together some courseware for VB.NET and ASP.NET .. but no specific details on this yet.
MSDE was also discussed in length. In summary, MSDE is a free version of SQL Server. You as the developer need to have a full blown version of SQL Server on your machine so you can get all the tools and utilities. Then once you write the software, you can distribute it along with MSDE to the client. The limitation of MSDE is that there’s a performance degradation as more users concurrently hit the database.
Main Presentation “Quick Reports” by Mike Timpe
Mike showed us the app he works on and explained how they dynamically create FRX reports on the fly based on information in a grid. Here’s the raw notes I took during the meeting:
Management Reporting Module for beverage system
Inquiries for data
Quick Report
Pick the grid … tell it to print .. it automatically builds an frx on the fly
It automatically totals numeric fields
You can tell it NOT to total a field, such as a numeric id field, or a zip code
Can’t do parent/child stuff – can only do the parent
Mike has stripped framework code so he can give us a copy of the code
The “grid” drives the report. What you see on the grid, is basically what you see on the report. It looks at the columns on the grid to determine headers and data to print on the report.
Switches between landscape and portrait.
Doesn’t do a lot with fonts right now. Uses Arial Narrow as the default because it’s proportional .. but numbers are all the same widths.
Take the grid, columns outside the view, those do some totaling so the report can do some percentage totaling.
Set some properties to say that columns on the grid DO NOT appear on the report. If you have too many fields, they just fall off the end of the report.
Uses -> because some underlying code is looking for this to figure out table and field names.
Group header and group footers are available .. but in the framework so he can’t give us that code.
Properties on the grid control how the data looks on the report.
Code builds all the records in the FRX.
Mike may change it slightly before the Lansing group so he’ll le me know where the code is and whether there is a white paper available.
Upcoming meetings and speakers
The December meeting is scheduled for December 13, 2003. Because I left the meeting early I’m not sure if this was resolved yet, but last I knew, we don’t have a speaker lined up for December. We’re open to suggestions for ideas or even better, a volunteer.
FOX ROCKS!!
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Cathy Pountney
GRAFUG Secretary