I wrote a long time ago about the “Stealth” subreport. This is an invisible subreport that runs in the background and provides a value to the main report as a shared variable. But if you have a few of these subreports in the same container report it can be difficult to do troubleshooting. To see what the subreports are returning, you have to go into each of the subreport’s key sections to unhide or unsuppress them.

But I received a suggestion from Gordon Portanier that makes it simple to activate and deactivate “stealth” mode in all of the subreports in one place. First you write a formula like this and place it in the report header of the main report:

WhilePrintingRecords;
Shared BooleanVar Stealth;
Stealth := True;

Then you go to each of the sections in the subreport(s) that you want to turn on and off when troubleshooting. Instead of hiding or suppressing those sections, you put in a suppress condition that says:

WhilePrintingRecords;
Shared BooleanVar Stealth;

As long as the first formula isn’t modified, those sections should stay suppressed and the subreport should stay invisible. When you want them to appear you comment out the bottom line in the first formula, the one that assigns the value TRUE to the variable. Because Boolean variables are FALSE by default the variable will revert to FALSE and all the sections where you used that condition will now appear.
So, thanks again to Gordon Portanier of Crystalize in Canada for sharing this suggestion.