Web Elements Dynamic functionality

Question

Hello Jamie,
I am in great hopes that you wil help me overcome my problem in regards to webelements. I've been going through lot of WE samples for crystal and have seen them working well. However I have noticed that most of the examples have hard coded the data within. Currently I am working on a project which has a requirenment to display interactive and dynamic content through crystal, I am using WE functions to achieve the functionality.
Example: I am trying to build a checkbox which should display dynamic content based on the users promtp selection. Like if a user selects country then the chkbox should display all the countries from the DB. The syntax for the chkbox goes something like this:
Stringvar values:= "1|2|3|4";
Stringvar displays:="some values";
stringvar defaults:=(?user prompt)
Wecheckbox("user prmpt",values,displays,defaults,rest of the parameters..........)
In this if i hard code the value the checkbox works fine.
My questioni is, how do I program this to show me the dynamic content in the report, I've been struggling a lot on this issue but unable to figure out. I want my syntax to be like:
stringvar values:="|";
stringvar displays:=({My database table name or formula})
stringvar defaults:=(?user prompt)
I have tried doing the above but I receive only one value or rather only the first entry of the database along with few array error messages,
while declaring the stringvar for values and displays,how should I specify the database entries, I cannot hard code all the country names here and tht too which are dynamic, it could be country today, may be produt tomorrow and so on....Also how would the value variable would know the count of countries
Please let me know a solution out of this. I have more confusions in regards to WE functions, I would post my rest of the questions on a different thread.
I would appreciate your help on this.

Answer 1

hello,
as you've found out if you put the functions on the report header you get the first record...on the report footer you get the last record. webelements are the same as crystal formulae in that they take the records available to them at that time.
first off, have a look at the webelementsDCP (dynamic cascading prompt) report...this is an example of a report using dynamic / database driven values for the functions.
in order to get a list of values from your database, you need to roll them up into a long text string while the report is reading the records from the database. in crystal reports, this happens top to bottom on the report. in the subreports in the DCP report, values are rolled up and then passed to the main report via a shared variable.
if you put a formula on your report details section that reads something like
whileprintingrecords;
stringvar s1:= s1 + + "|"
you will see the values roll up.
if you have a webelements report where you have the option of putting the controls at the report footer, then there's not as much work involved.
if you need the controls at the top of the page then you can use the technique like in the DCP report. look at the "select..." formulae on the webelementsDCP report and you will see that they use the shared variables created in the subreports.
cheers,
jamie