The Separation Model – Part 11 – Reporting Separated
Reporting is one of the most field hungry things you can ever do within FileMaker. So, what do I mean by field hungry? Well, take your standard timestamp value for example. It's composed of many different pieces of information - many you may want to report on. It has a day name, day value, month name, month value, month number, year number, hours, minutes, seconds and maybe even a time zone.
WOW! That's a lot of extra fields. I count at least ten different additional fields. I'd really hate to add even a portion of these extra fields to any data table which requires them for reporting. It's just a lot of extra "cruft" in my data file.
So what are the options? Well, to give you a hint, you can easily create a "Reporting" file and do everything within that dedicated file. In fact, in many cases this is a very safe and sound solution.
Then again, we have to take into account what our deployment model is. This is really the determining factor of how we're going to report. Is the UI file on the client device or being shared on the server? Do we want to maintain older reports so they can be printed in the future? Are we going to save a PDF version, save the data or simply use the original data? Will the original data change?
What about what's needed in order to print the report? How about security and access? Should all users be able to see, access and print all reports in the system?
These are all questions you'll have to ask of yourself when designing your own system. In this video I give you a ton of solid information about how printing might work in the Data Separation model. Give it a watch!