* Issues with Report Plugins

[tatewise]

This posting is prompted by the Notes: create heading (19742) discussion.
It focuses on the Publish > Miscellaneous Reports > Note Records standard report plugin but similar issues affect the others:
Calendar, File Statistics, Individual Scrapbook, Place Report, Research Notes, Sources and Citations, and Tagged Notes.

In particular, the Note Records report repeats a truncated version of the Note text as the Heading Level 1 text.
That is not very attractive and there is no way to change it on the Report > Options > Format tab as in most standard reports.
Similarly, the other report plugins have no way to change the Heading Level 1 text via the Format tab.

To overcome that particular problem, I supplied the user with a custom Note Records report plugin that uses the Custom Id field of the Note record as the Heading Level 1 text, and published an enhanced version of that in the Plugin Store.

The Restore Defaults button for the Sources tab and Page Layout tab usually does NOT restore the settings!
I investigated the FH_Reset(sTab) function. The first wrinkle is that tab names are lower-case with Page Layout called 'layout'.
Trying to associate the .fhr ini-file settings with the tab settings is tediously awkward and there are a lot of them!
There needs to be a simple way to restore the standard defaults that plugin authors can invoke.

Furthermore, if such report plugins are incorporated into a Book or Booklet there are further issues, which may be because of the CI_BOOK_ITEM_HEADING feature not being used in the supplied plugins.

1. The Chapter number is not prefixed on the Heading Level 1 text when the report created by the plugin is a Chapter.
2. Usually, in the Edit Book dialogue, after selecting a report from the Current Book Items, the Settings cog button allows various options to be adjusted but they misbehave for report plugins:
   • The Item tab offers Heading and Format options that are somewhat disregarded by report plugins.
   • The Format tab offers many irrelevant options that are not supported by report plugins.
3. If a standard report with multiple records is added to a Book then each record is assigned to a separate Chapter.
   A plugin report with multiple records is entirely assigned to just one Chapter so each record cannot have a separate Chapter number.

Does anyone have any workarounds for the above issues or know whether CP are aware of them?

[tatewise]

The more I investigate Report Plugins further issues are surfacing.
In general, the strategy is a great idea, but the implementation lacks many crucial features.
IMO there needs to be a two-pronged approach:
(1) Report the plugin issues to CP;
(2) Add KB advice for Report Plugin authors or significantly improve the FH Help page for Report Plugins;

One mystery I cannot solve is where some Book settings are saved.
In the Edit Book dialogue, for a Current Book Item, the cog Settings on the Item tab can specify a Heading, etc.
Those cog Settings are local to a particular Book in a particular Project and are preserved when FH and Project are closed.
However, I have no idea where they are preserved. They are not in the Project's Books folder. So where are they hiding?

[mjashby]

Mike,

Not certain but the small utility linked below, might help with tracking down what gets written to the system and where any changes are recorded:

https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities ... d-portable

I mostly used as described simply to identify where apps add their settings or make Registry/system changes during installation and/or when running.

Mervyn

[tatewise]

Thank you Mervyn, but my previous experiences with similar utilities is that too many changes are reported.
I've used 'unusual' text for the settings involved and searched likely folders and Registry entries for that text without success.
So I have asked CP where it is saved.

[tatewise]

I have discovered the Book settings in the Books folder in the bookdata.fha file but using a rather unusual format.
Opening it in Notepad says it is an ANSI encoded file but the characters are mostly separated by 0 data bytes, which suggests some form of UTF-16 encoding. Still trying to decode it.

[Ron Melby]

I dont have any custom books, so the sample book for monro is what I looked at

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ looks a little better than Notepad, I see a lot of Ariel 10.