One of my readers recently stumbled onto a trick and decided to share it with me. He wanted to display how long his reports took to run. He knew he could tap into the DataDate and DataTime to get the time the report started. His recent realization was that he could put a subreport in the report footer and get a second DataDate/Time at the end of the process. By comparing the two he would know the time it took for the report to run. By using DataDate and DataTime the values wouldn’t change, even if he saved the report with data and opened it a few days later.

The subreport can be completely blank other than this formula:

WhilePrintingRecords;
Shared DateTimeVar EndDT

Then in a separate report footer (below the section containing the subreport) we add this formula:

WhilePrintingRecords;
Shared DateTimeVar EndDT;

NumberVar TotalSec := DateDiff ('s', DataDate + DataTime, EndDT);

NumberVar H := Truncate(Remainder(TotalSec, 86400)/3600);
NumberVar M := Truncate(Remainder(TotalSec, 3600)/60);
NumberVar S := Remainder(TotalSec , 60) ;

Totext ( H, '0' ) + ':' +
Totext ( M,'00' ) + ':' +
Totext ( S,'00' )

The end result uses one of my web formulas to generate a string formatted as h:mm:ss, but there are other format options.

And thanks to Mark Edwards at DataReport Consulting for sharing his discovery.