Suppressing certain pages of a report

Question

I need to build a large report that contains multiple reports (30 or so reports in all). I want the user to be able to select from a parameter form which reports the large report will contain. Is there a way to set a trigger for each page that depends on the values passed from the parameter form. Someone please tell me what kind of trigger to use and how it should be coded.
Thanks,
Tripp

Answer 1

I'm not sure I understand: "Is there a way to set a trigger for each page". This seems to imply that you have one report and you want to restrict values displayed in that report. To do this you would just add a user parameter and reference it in the query to restrict the values returned. You wouldn't restrict the values in the layout.
However, if you do mean that you have a large report will contain 30 or so individual "reports" in it. Then each of these "reports" will have an independant section in the layout which should be surrounded by a variable sized frame - say M_1, M_2,.. M_30. In your output, you only want say "M_5" to be printed.
To do this, you need to create a format trigger against: "M_1", "M_2", .. "M_30". You would then have a user parameter "p_report" which you would reference in the format trigger as something like - for M_5:
function M_5FormatTrigger return boolean is
begin
return (nvl(:p_report, 'none') = 'M_5');
end;
To print only M_5, pass p_report=M_5 ont he command line.
You probably already have something more friendly than 'M_5' as the input value for the parameter.
You should also look at restricting the data retrieved by each of the other "reports" in your large report. You can do this by adding a lexical parameter to each of the queries so that they return no rows unless they are required by the "report".