Alpha Software

Alpha Five now has new 'interactive reporting' features. These features are also sometimes referred to a 'drill down' or 'drill through' reporting.

To support interactive reporting, you can now put buttons and hot-spots on reports, and you can define events that should occur when these buttons or hot-spots are clicked. You can also define events for field objects on reports (which is essentially equivalent to putting a hot-spot object over a field object). You can define the code for these events using either Action Scripting, or hand-coded Xbasic.

When you preview a report (or label or letter), the buttons, hot-spots and fields for which OnPush events were defined become 'hot' and clicking on them will invoke the event code that you have defined for the object.

Typical events that you might define for buttons, hot-spots and field objects include:

• Previewing another report to show more detail for the current row in a report - i.e. in a report showing a customer list and a balance outstanding for each customer, you could click on the 'amount due' field to open a report showing all of the unpaid invoices included in the amount due.
• Opening a form to show more detail for the current row - i.e. in a report showing a customer list, you could click on a button that was placed next to the customer id. This would open a form to edit information about the current customers.
• Running an Operation - e.g. you might have a button on an invoice report that exported all of the line items for the current invoice to an Excel file.

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