I'm creating a printed report of an event; each event has one or more groups, each group has one or more people. The report page is set externally; I can't change that. Each page of the report has a place for up to two groups and up to 6 people.
The rules for where groups are put on pages are complicated; suffice to say that sometimes I put two groups on a page and sometimes I don't.
When there are more than 6 people in the one or two groups on a page, I need to generate an additional page with the event and group information on it, and list the overflow of people on that page, until all people are reported.
So the report doesn't lend itself to creating report fields that match database fields, nor to any simple form of mapping records to report pages. I will have to write logic that determines what data goes onto what pages; I would like advice on what general strategy to use.
I had thought of creating a typed dataset, mapping one dataset instance for each report page, and writing logic to fill each dataset instance according to the report rules. Does that sound like the best approach, or should I be looking at something else?
I'm a novice in this technology. I'm hoping to get advice on the approach so I can learn about that, instead of wasting time learning ways to do it that are not appropriate to this problem.
thanks in advance,