Linked Reports

[webbmatt]

Hi everyone,

I have an Access XP application which ships with generic reporting that we sell to all new clients. The time has come that our generic reports no longer suit the needs of all of our customers and we're being asked to develop custom reports. In order to keep our application generic we don't want to be adding these custom reports into our base version as they would not apply to all customers. Nor would we want to get involved in maintaining multiple copies of the system, each containing different reports.

I can't figure out how (if at all possible) we could achieve a solution to this problem. It seems the logical solution would be to have an external mdb that contains custom reports that can be called upon by the main app as and when applicable. We could then ship the generic app along with a seperate reports.mdb if custom reports were required by customers.

Any help or guidance would be much appreciated.

webbmatt

 

[ajetrumpet]

why can't you put these custom reports in your main application? what's wrong with that? How many customers do you have? How many require a custom report? If there isn't a million of them, I don't see why you can't leave them in your main application.

Are you worried about file size? Too many objects in the DB window? Or, possibly too much data that will confuse people?

 

[webbmatt]

thanks ajetrumpet,

the issue is not that we've got millions of customers, but that if all goes well that we may have something in the hundreds...

it seems a cluttered way of having to do things if we need to deploy reports that don't apply to all customers, even if they are hidden when not required. This would increase file size and clutter up the mdb, but those aren't our main concerns...

if there's not a way to store these reports in an external file (external to the generic application) then I'd say my only option would be to store all of the custom reports with the database and come up with a mechanism for hiding and unhiding them for different customers.

how would you go about it? i'm just trying to find the best way of going about it...

 

[namliam]

how would you go about it? i'm just trying to find the best way of going about it...

I would make one db for all customers. The size required for an additional report is not much all. Even for 10 reports....

Just go with one DB, is much easier to maintain as well