hi again adam,
i have been playing a bit with the assembly and it works quite well.
the more i play with it, the more i wonder if it's not simpler to create a stored procedure that retrieves all styles in a dataset that then can be referenced in the report wherever needed. that would reduce the overhead of executing the vb code and it would also read the entire dataset with all styles once instead of calling the database for each function call.
i guess i must be missing something to not see the obvious advantage when using the assembly though...
thanks,
olaf