Tip of the Month (August 2006)

Controlling Report CE from a Visual CE Form

When launching a Report CE report from a comand button on a Visual CE form, you may want to control the user interaction. For example, you may want to suppress the "print preview" window or have it print without first putting up the printer dialog.

Report CE allows you to specify command line switches to do these sort of things. These switches are documented in the Report CE manual (see, "Running a Report from a Visual Basic or C/C++ Application" at the end of the manual).

You can use these same switches in a Visual CE command button. To use these switches, create a command button ("Run external" or "Report CE report") and simply type in the switch immediately before the file pathname (in the "Command" or "Report" data entry box).

For example, say you wanted to suppress the print preview and printer selection dialog boxes, instead of

\Program Files\My Report.rce

use

/gq \Program Files\My Report.rce