Well, MAX is coming up in just a tiny little bit now, just a tad bit over a week actually (Sept 30 - Oct 3). Ben made sure we had all of our materials in really early this year (well, from past years anyways), which was a good thing. I started out making the content for my hands on with enough time to make sure it will all work properly. The content ended up being more than 70 pages long (73 pages to be exact) for just the hand out... That's a lot of content.

My sessions are full too, unfortunately, even though it's being repeated four (4) times. There's only room for 50 seats in the hands on rooms, unlike the regular session rooms, and with more than 4000 people already attending (that's a lot by the way), I know that many people will not be able to get in.

To whet your appetite, though, in case you got in, these are the things that are going to be covered in the session:

• Basic Report with a Subreport
• Grouping and Aggregate Reports
• Adding in an Index
• Initialization, Table of Contents, and Page Reordering
• The CFReport Tag

I've been trying to get the session on the docket for MAX Europe as well, but I don't know if that will happen. I can hope, though :-D And if you are going to MAX Europe and not MAX North America, send a friendly note to the MAX organizers asking (demanding?) that my session be offered there as well. As Ben Forta put it when reading the draft for the first time: "Wow, the content is phenomenal! Honestly, this is one of the best hands-on sessions I have ever seen." (he really did say that too...)

Hope to see you there!

At the upcomming MAX 2007 conference I will be giving the Hands On: Advanced ColdFusion Reporting session (no link yet, sorry). And I want to make it worth anyones while who attends. The text blurb on the MAX site says:
Reporting is one of the most important features in ColdFusion, and reporting capabilities have been significantly enhanced in ColdFusion 8. This session will reveal the considerable power behind these surprisingly easy-to-use features. Creating advanced and sophisticated printable output is possible, and we'll show you how.

As this is a hands on, we'll actually be doing stuff during the session. I have several idea's of what could be done, and it's marked as Advanced so I'm assuming you know CFML and have done at least some things with ColdFusion Reporting. No offense, but neophytes need not apply. Also, this session will be all about CFReport, not about CFDocument.

So among my ideas are doing a table of contents (ie using the BeforeExport function), using CFML to let you choose where to start exporting stuff for the label wizard, and so on and so forth. But I would like to know what real world problems need to be solved. And not just stuff that Ben tells me, but stuff that you guys actually need. So here's my question (and I'm probably opening a can of worms by asking it), what are the difficult problems that you guys are having when exporting reports. Not just bugs that you are running into (I want those too, but they can't be addressed in a session), but reporting problems that you have and are having issues solving. What are the tips and tricks that I need to teach in order to make the session worth your time.

Comment away my friends, comment away.

Also, I'll see everyone at CFUnited here in a few days as well :-)

For those who were interested, the demo files that I used for the MAX Advanced reporting session can be found here.

If they use a database, (not all of them do use a database) it's the cfartgallery that ships with ColdFusion 7.

I just got this from the official guys, so I figured I would pass it along. I will be at MAX giving a presentation called "Advanced ColdFusion Printing and Reporting", although it seems that the website coordinators don't want you to be able to find it. If you go into the session coordinator flex widgety thing, you can see it there under the Web Development track. It just doesn't show up under the normal website listing.

Fear not, however, as I am doing it twice. Once on Tuesday morning after the keynote and before lunch and once on Wednesday right after lunch (or during, depends on how you look at the schedule). Plus I will be around in general so you can ask me whatever questions you want as well (although I won't promise to answer then the way you want me to...). I'll probably be hanging around the ColdFusion team speakers (we have several) when they are doing their presentations, or whatever really looks interesting. Just look for the tall, red-haired, not-so-skinny guy.

Anyways, you can see the "official" looking thing below.