Create and manage report templates

A report template defines the layout of a professionally-designed report that you can use to quickly create an initial report design.

When you have multiple reports with the same structure but different data sources, you can use report templates to provide a consistent look-and-feel for similar reports.

The Report Designer comes installed with existing templates, for example, Simple Invoices and Grouped Lists with Totals. When creating a report, you can choose from the existing list of templates, or you can create your own report template.

A template is a .4rt file. It is a general report design that is not tied to a specific data source. It is a graphical design of a report, and you associate data with data placeholders that have been set in the graphical design. You decide which data to inject by specifying the data source when you select the data schema.

When the data source is selected, two things need to be mapped: the structure of the data with the structure of the template, and the fields from the schema to the data placeholders in the template.