| The Report Design Document / Overview of Genero Report Designer | |
You create a Report Design document (4rp) which defines the report page as consisting of box-shaped containers, to hold the data objects and text or image objects that make up the report.
The organization of the report can be seen in the Structure View. Containers and their contents can be moved around in the View to insure that they print in the correct order.
Triggers in the Structure View specify what should be printed when a trigger event (change in data) occurs.
Your Report Design Document will use an rdd file to determine the data schema for a report. The same rdd file can be used for multiple report definitions.
The available data objects are shown in the Data View, containing the Data Schema (rdd file). At runtime the data is sent to the report by a BDL report program. The BDL Program page explains the ways that report data can be fetched.
Each report element has properties, displayed in the Properties View, with values that you can change.
In addition to literal values, expressions can be used to change the value of report elements properties. For example, the appearance can be changed conditionally, by creating an expression to turn the background color red if the value for the form element is greater than 1000.
This view is used by any module to display its output. The output of the various modules (messages, errors, results of commands, and so on) is displayed as tabs in the view.
The Document Errors tab displays any error messages for the report design document.