Provide user-friendly field names for reports

Make it easier on your report designers by providing field names that they will understand.

About this task

The names of the fields in the Business Record diagram are taken from the column names of the database table that the field is based on. These names are used when the data schema is created, which means that they appear in the Data View used by the report designer when creating a report design. In a complex project, these names can be long and their purpose can be unclear.

The colAliasName property allows you to define user-friendly names for these fields, which will be written out to the data schema and will appear in the Data View for the report designer.

Note:

The colAliasName property only impacts reports. It will not have any affect when set on business records defined for a form or Web service.

Steps

  1. Open the Report Data (.4rd) file.
  2. In the Business Record diagram, click on the field you wish to provide an alias for.
  3. In the Properties view, enter the user-friendly name in the colAliasName property.

In the Business Record diagram, the alias name displays (within parentheses) after the field name.