The user has a report that asks for an opening balance, and then displays and accumulates selected records to calculate the closing balance to use in next month’s report. Could we use the Share User Function Library to make this a more seamless process?

The first task was to calculate a unique identifier for each month to label the value we want to store. As the balances were accumulated monthly, we calculated this as:

“Bal-“ + ToText(CurrrentDate,”yyyy-MM”)

We also need an identifier to pick up the previous month’s value. This uses the Date Range “LastFullMonth”

and a minimum of that date range to pick up the first day of the previous month. The formula is:

"Bal-" + ToText(Minimum(LastFullMonth),"yyyy-MM")

At the start of the report we need to retrieve the previous month value. This doesn’t need an evaluation time as it can be even be done BeforeReadingRecords. With the default evaluation time of WhileReadingRecords, this formula can be used in other formulas and accumulated in a summary.

Val(ShareTagFetch ("c:\Bal.xml",{@Last Month ID}))

In the report footer section you need to formula to save the balance for the next month run of the report.

WhilePrintingRecords;

ShareTagStore ("c:\Bal.xml", {@This Month ID}, ToText(Sum({table.field})))

While it would be possible to use a parameter to enter the opening balance, using this approach reduces the chance of user error. The XML file will contain the values for each month and a report can be rerun for any prior period with the correct opening balance.