Displaying records from database table

The easiest (and fastest) way for displaying the database records is shown in following example:

[FormFields]
wb_basename=biblio.mdb
wb_rcdset=Titles
WB_Command=Q
WB_TempName=$default$

This will produce simplest report containing all fields from table Titles in a HTML table, on a white background, broken in pages containing 20 records per page. This report is not completely useless and usually is used for testing purposes.
However, to make report a little bit nicer we will do small changes in previous example:

[FormFields]
wb_basename=biblio.mdb
wb_rcdset=Titles
WB_Command=Q
WB_MaxRec=10







$wbdetail[t]

Now we have added some title to the report and some HTML formatting using $WBDetail[T] function and CSS styles. We also changed the number of records per page using WB_MaxRec.
With further modifications we can include Author's and Publisher's names instead of their ID numbers, and sort titles by year in descending order as shown in following example:

[FormFields]
wb_basename=biblio.mdb
WB_RcdSet=(Authors inner join titles on authors.au_id=titles.au_id) inner join publishers on publishers.pubid=titles.pubid
WB_DBFlds=Title,[Year Published],ISBN,Authors.Name as Author,publishers.Name as Publisher
WB_Command=Q
WB_MaxRec=10
WB_Order=[Year published] desc







$wbdetail[t]

To enable search though this recordset we should add the search form and modify the recordset definition as shown in following example:

[FormFields]
wb_basename=biblio.mdb
WB_RcdSet=(select Title,[Year Published],ISBN,Authors.Name as Author,publishers.Name as Publisher,Authors.Name,publishers.Name from (Authors inner join titles on authors.au_id=titles.au_id) inner join publishers on publishers.pubid=titles.pubid)
WB_Command=Q
WB_MaxRec=10
WB_Order=[Year published] desc

Select year of publishing:
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

Title:

Author:

Publisher:

Return records that:
match all conditions match any of the conditions

$wbdetail[t]

This looks much better, but in some cases there is a need for placing the database field in a specific location on your report, or even not using HTML at all. In that case we do not use $WBDetail function but some (or all) of database field functions $WBF, $WBRF. In the following example we will modify the code so it will return previous recordset in XML format:

[FormFields]
wb_basename=biblio.mdb
WB_RcdSet=(Authors inner join titles on authors.au_id=titles.au_id) inner join publishers on publishers.pubid=titles.pubid
WB_DBFlds=Title,[Year Published],ISBN,Authors.Name as Author,publishers.Name as Publisher
WB_Command=Q
WB_MaxRec=$all$
WB_Order=[Year published] desc
WB_ContentType=text/xml




$wbf[year published]
$wbf[isbn]
$wbf[Author]
$wbf[Publisher]

We modified WB_MaxRec to special value $all$ (this will show all records from recordset in a single report page) and set the WB_ContentType variable to text/xml. Note that we also had to use $WBMREPL function to replace apostrophe and ampersand characters in field "Title".

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