I recently wrote about a method for sharing an array between a main report and a subreport. But that method is only practical under certain conditions. Now, Ido Millet of Millet Software has given us another method by adding three functions to his “CUT Light” UFL. These functions allow you to store and retrieve “key-value pairs” in memory. You store them using one function and retrieve them using another. The key-value pairs can be stored and retrieved anywhere within a report including within any subreports.

The advantage of this method is that it eliminates the slow looping logic you need to search for a value in a large array. And while Crystal arrays can hold a maximum of 1000 elements, there is no limit to the number of key-value pairs you can store.

The functions are called:

• uflLookupAddEntry()
• uflLookupGetEntry()
• uflLookupResetEntries()

The first function adds a key pair, the second retrieves the value based on the key, and the third is used to clear the memory space at the beginning of each report run. I did a test with 2000 key-pairs and found it very fast.