Report Question

FLX TMS FlexCel for VCL & FMX
1

First things first: Flexcel is a great piece of software. I love it. I had so many different Excel libs befrore nothing even comes near this great and platform idependant library!


I now want o use it as report generator in my new project (Linux/WIndows/OSX), works well including directly generating PDFs. What I did not find our by now is:

Can I feed the report with a single dataset that has repeating contents for groups, for example:

Miller Beer 12
Miller Beer 17
Miller Lemonade 12
Smith Lemonade 18
Jones Lemonade 19

Or do I have to split such a dataset into several sets and define relationships?
2

Well, it depends on what you want to do with the data. If you want to dump it "as is" of course you can, and it will look exactly like the data in your example.

If you want to group the report into something like:
Beer
   Miller 12
   Miller 17
Lemanoade
   Miller 12
   Smith 18
   Jones 19

Then you have indeed to create a master-detail report to tell Flexel how it should be grouped. Should it group by kind (lemonade, beer) or by name (miller, smith, jones)? Or maybe group by both?

Now, to create the split dataset for the master detail, you can do it all in the config sheet, and it won't really have the data twice. You use a DISTINCT to create the different tables: http://www.tmssoftware.biz/flexcel/doc/vcl/guides/reports-designer-guide.html#grouping-tables

Please take a look at the example:
http://www.tmssoftware.biz/flexcel/doc/vcl/samples/delphi/reports/master-detail-on-one-table/index.html
3

Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for.  I tried lots of the examples but oversaw this one.