Overview

Database applications let you view and edit data, but quite often their output should be physically printed to paper. Technically, Delphi supports printing in many different ways, from direct text output to the use of the printer Canvas, from sophisticated database reporting to the generation of documents in various formats (from Microsoft's Word to Sun's OpenOffice). In this chapter we'll focus exclusively on reports and in particular on the use of the third-party reporting Rave engine included in Delphi 7. If you are interested in other Delphi techniques for driving the printer, see the related material on my website (discussed in Appendix C, "Free Companion Books on Delphi").

Reporting tools are important because they can perform complex processing by themselves: the reporting subsystem can become a stand-alone application. Although this chapter focuses on how you can produce a report from the dataset within your Delphi programs, you should always keep in mind the autonomous nature of reports evaluating such a tool.

Reports must be created with care, because they represent a user interface for your applications that goes beyond and is sometimes more significant than the software itself. Many more people will probably look at the printed reports than just the users who produce the reports using the programs. For this reason, it's important to have good-quality reports and a flexible architecture to let users customize them.