| The Report Design Document / Overview of Genero Report Designer | |
The Report Design window displays when you launch the Report Designer.
In the Report Design window, you create a Report Design document (.4rp). The Report Design document (4rp) 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 Report Design window consists of the work area and several views. If a view is not visible, you may need to add it using the menu.
The work area is located in the center of Genero Studio. When you open a report, this area contains the report page.
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 data schema file is specified in the Data View. Once a data schema has been selected in the Data View, the available data objects are shown. The data schema is only used during report development. At runtime, the data is sent to the report by the report application.
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.
The Output 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.