I've been recently asked to alter a canned report for Development. They want the Print Acknowledgement Letters report to include an extra field that will specify which text their Word template will generate when they print their letters each day; a simple concept, yes.
However, I am not an Infomaker expert - or fan, for that matter - and am generally leery of mucking around with Tessitura's canned reports if it's not necessary. So, my standard answer is to make use of the highly preferable Visual Studio and put most reports on our Reporting Services site.
My concern with this strategy is by not using the canned report, am I missing out on some sort of internal process (i.e. a stored procedure) that needs to run in the background to make certain important updates, to whatever myriad tables in Tessitura may be involved, in the running of the original report that won't be done using Reporting Services?
Also, are we maybe overthinking this? Is there perhaps a better way to accomplish this task - perhaps even one that Tessitura already designed but is not being implemented at the moment - wherein for whatever different kind of contribution we receive, we can have different verbiage automatically chosen for the printing of the letters? Or is a well-designed Word merge letter template the best way?
Or do I need to start taking some Infomaker and Tessitura Reporting classes pronto?
Thank you in advance, Tessiturians.
Matt Gonzales
I am not a whiz-bang programmer, but I have created a local procedure copy of the procedure behind acknowledgments, adding a couple of extra fields (both program-name-related); I then added these fields to the end of the data columns in the InfoMaker report, saving it as a custom, user-defined report as part of my custom library; then went into t_defaults and added my custom InfoMaker report to the acknowledgments that needed the extra fields. Given that we merge from the acknowledgment report into Word, I didn’t worry too much about how the InfoMaker report displays when run in Tessitura.
I haven’t changed the standard report, just copied it to something new, so that if anything I did breaks down the line, I still have the standard report to use; or if, during an upgrade, the standard report is written over, my copy is unaffected.
Lucie