A Promise is a Promise

Back in October, I promised to elaborate on the Southwest Fox 2007 conference and review some of the sessions. Well, Santa is checking out who has been naughty and who has been nice, and frankly, I need as many of the “nice” checkboxes checked as possible. I apologize for the delay, but for those of you who are still awishin’ and ahopin’ I would come through, here ya go.

Before I begin, I would like to regurgitate (what a revolting word; but fun to say) what you have undoubtedly read on many occasions in the past. Namely, if you have never attended a developer conference, what the heck are you waiting for?  15 years ago I was in the same boat.  I read (almost) those exact same words and thought a developers’ conference can’t be that good.  Well, I was wrong and every time I think I am right, I attend another conference and prove to myself that I am, indeed, wrong, wrong, wrong. Believe me; if you are in the trenches and do application development (i.e. write code) on a daily basis, you owe it to yourself to attend a conference specializing in the coding discipline of your choice. While I am partial to Visual FoxPro, other conferences for other languages are just as rewarding. You get shortcuts, tips, tricks, traps as well as renewed enthusiasm for your work. You get the chance to meet with people who are in the same “development boat” as you.  You are not an island.  OK, you may be an island, but in a chain of islands that, together, form a beneficial archipelago. Bottom line,.. Consider attending a conference of your choice. I wax poetic, but I also digress, so on with the show.

The two sessions I will address in this blog are the two sessions given by Cathy Pountney.  Some of you may know that a few years ago I was a technical editor on a Hentzenwerke book, “The Visual FoxPro Report Writer – Pushing It to the Limits and Beyond” written by Cathy. It was written in the days when Microsoft swore that the report writer would never be improved. It is still a very viable book for those of you who have not upgraded to VFP 9. However, with the release of VFP 9, many of the enhancements were to the report writer.  So much so, that it is almost a totally different animal. While I have been hibernating in a cave mainly doing maintenance work on applications written in VFP 8 and earlier, Cathy has been leading the charge to push the VFP 9 report writer past its limits and right into the 5^th dimension. So while she is on the cutting edge of the report writer enhancements, I have made a comfortable home on the coagulating edge. I still have a few years of coding energy left in me and I felt it high time that I get on the VFP 9 report writer band wagon. I was reluctant to do so because I felt so at ease with the “old way” and besides, it was a bit intimidating, but biting the bullet, I attended both of Cathy’s sessions with the express purpose of getting over my fears and intimidation.  BOY, am I glad I did!

“Getting Your Head Around the VFP ReportListener” was the first session. This was the session that I was hoping would remove the mystique from the newest version of the report writer. It did, or I should say, Cathy did. She knows her audience. She can speak to her audience so that the “difficult to grasp” is “graspable”. This was a good thing. When I walked out of this session, I had been (practically by hand) taken through the basics of the reportlistener.  One of the revelations, at least for me, was how the various components worked together to produce the report. In the old days (pre-VFP9) there was just the report engine.  With VFP 9, you not only have the engine, but the listener object, the preview container (separate from the report engine) and the extension handler. This fact, in and of itself, was a key to understanding the “new and improved; whiter than white” report writer. Each component was explained and placed in its proper environment as it relates to creating reports. Next came all of the new properties, events, and methods. Cathy’s practical, real-world examples using several of the methods and properties made the task of creating the reports seem easy.  It was at that point that she dangled the carrot in front of me that by knowing the basics and understanding the fundamental concepts, developers could then use them to their advantage to create reports the way the user has requested (instead of being forced into a pigeon hole of “this is the ONLY way it can be done”).  Extensibility.  What a concept!  Unfortunately, those tricks will be shown in her OTHER session.  For now, she continued with the basics. It was just like having to take Chemistry 101 to learn the periodic table BEFORE you could take Advanced Chemistry and blow things up. Also, she is correct. Learning the basics of the methods, events, and properties is what will allow us to (in a nice way) blow things up when we need to print out those mind-boggling reports.

OK, now for the cool stuff.  With the basics out of the way, I later went to the “OutFox the VFP Report Writer: Printing on My Terms” session. I am really glad that I went to the basic session first because this session built upon those concepts. Rather than tell you about the session, I am going to list just a few of the new abilities that users of VFP 9 have at their disposal. How about being able to select which pages of the report they want to print?  Or printing only the odd pages, or only the even pages?  You can now specify how the report is collated and how many pages print on a sheet of paper (ideal for printing “mini pamphlets”).  You can specify the margins. Perfect when you want a wider margin for three-hole punching. You can shrink to fit the page.  How cool is that?  Haven’t you ever printed out a report and ONE detail line printed on the second page?  If only you could have shrunk the report enough to get it all on one page.  NOW, you can. You can rotate the report; you can specify different size paper for different pages. You can create your own printer dialog to allow for user input as to all of the specifications mentioned above. Using the extension handler, you can customize the preview container toolbar or modify the print dialog box.  I haven’t even added the use of GDI+ to the equation. BOTH sessions were eye-opening. BOTH sessions did exactly what I had hoped; namely removed the mystique and pointed me in the right direction and allowed me to say to myself, “This isn’t so tough.”  Of course it isn’t when someone else has done the heavy lifting.  Cathy would be the first to acknowledge that she gained valuable insight in certain areas of the VFP 9 report writer from others more informed than she. THAT is the beauty of these conferences. Developers sharing and passing down information so that the less informed can be educated. THAT is another reason why you should consider attending a conference if you never have.

Lastly, and realistically, there is no way one person could walk out of those sessions, sit down to the keyboard, and put what they saw into immediate use. Fortunately they don’t have to, but when they are ready, Cathy provided (as did all speakers) examples, code samples, and white papers about the topics so that you could review later and take the time to master this facet of Visual FoxPro.  Two sessions; tightly coupled, but giving me the basic fundamental understanding and the wherewithal to decide how to move forward in the manner that most benefits me when attempting to tame this beast. Time well spent.