Dynamically Create Reports

Answer:

In this particular case, you're trying to make the template do too much work. Rather than trying to specifically set values to an ID, you should look upon the report as an auto-generated table. You can take a couple of approaches to accomplish this task—you could generate the table through a VB routine that writes output directly into a DIV, or you could create a reference to a table object and generate the information via the DHTML object model.

The former is arguably the simpler of the two approaches, but is also significantly slower since the Web page has to parse and recreate the HTML based upon the initial input string. Let's say that you had a SQL table called ReportData, and you wanted to output each field as one entry in the table. The first approach would look much like the outputTableA given here:

sub outputTable(rs as Recordset,divEl as IHTMLDIVElement)
     dim buffer as String
     dim fld as Field
     buffer=""
     buffer=buffer+""
     rs.MoveFirst
     for each fld in rs.Fields
         buffer=buffer+""
     next
     buffer=buffer+""
     while not rs.eof
            buffer=buffer+""
            for each fld in rs.Fields
                   buffer=buffer+""
            next
            buffer=buffer+""
            rs.moveNext
     wend
    buffer=buffer+"
"+fld.name+"
"+fld.value+"
"            
    divEl. innerHTML=buffer
end sub

You would pass as arguments a recordset object and a reference to a DIV element within the WebControl page. Here is the subroutine that calls the OutputTable function:

sub showMyTable()
     dim doc as HTMLDocument
     dim rs as Recordset
     dim conn as Connection
     dim targetEl as IHTMLDIVElement

     set doc=webBrowser1.document
     set conn=new Connection
     conn.open myConnectionString  ' Obviously, this needs to be changed
     set rs=new Recordset
      rs.open "SELECT * FROM ReportItems",conn
      set targetEl=doc.all("displayTable")
      OutputTable rs,targetEl   
      rs.close
      conn.close
end sub

This approach poses a few problems, however. The buffering can take time for a large number of records. What's worse, when the string buffer is passed to the document, the document will need to render it all at once, causing your VB app to slow to a crawl while the table is rendering. For a large database, you may be better off using the document object model more fully, with the revised OutputTable:

sub outputTable(rs as Recordset,divEl as IHTMLDIVElement)
     dim tbl as IHTMLTable
     dim row as IHTMLTableRow
     dim cell as IHTMLTableCell
     dim fld as Field
 
     set tbl=divEl.document.createElement("TABLE")
     divEl.innerHTML=""
     divEl.appendChild tbl
     set row=tbl.insertRow 
     rs.MoveFirst
     for each fld in rs.Fields
         set cell=row.insertCell
         cell.innerText=fld.name
         cell.style.fontWeight="bold"
         cell.style.textAlign="center"
     next
     while not rs.eof
            set row=tbl.insertRow
            for each fld in rs.Fields
                   set cell=row.insertCell
                   cell.innerText=fld.value
            next
            rs.moveNext
     wend
end sub

Because these code objects are actually in memory, they will refresh the page more quickly, are easier to debug, and make for slightly easier to follow code. (I spent nearly four hours last week trying to debug outputted HTML as in the first example, and finally found that I was inadvertently putting a space between the end tag slash and its name—one of the more difficult things to catch in a debug). Moreover, in IE5, you can set the table attributes to FIXED and take advantage of this new feature to output partial tables. You can't do this with buffered HTML text.