I'm stretching my fairly elementary vb.net experience by trying to
write a report generator for a specialised utility. The report will
contain a simple tabular output, but there could be up to 100 or more
column types from which the user can choose to include on a specific
report and each type may have eg 10 attributes: name, value, width,
formatting etc etc
All the types and attributes are known at design time and could be
used to populate eg a structure array, though there obviously are
other alternatives.
But the question is about how best to persist this data. I don't
really want to assign the attributes one at a time, ie one line of
code per attribute, because that would create 1000 lines of code or
more and be pretty cumbersome to maintain. But equally it would be
nice to avoid a more structured solution such as eg an external
database that could bloat the program. In fact being able to embed the
data within the main assembly would seem to be a more elegant
solution, but I guess simplicity is more important than elegance.
Anyone have any advice please, bearing in mind that I'm not an expert
vb.net user.
Thanks
JGD