Report Designer

The Report Designer allows you to create your own custom report templates to provide advanced and visually attractive report outputs. You can design your custom reports using Report Designer with Export Data tool, design report in View Report command or to customize a Clash Report.

To run the Report Designer click on the Customize Report button.

"Report Designer"

Interface

Report Designer consists from of several parts:

Contains a set of items and sub items, which enable you to perform common actions over the report currently shown in the Design Panel. In general, it duplicates all the toolbar buttons available on the Main, Formatting and Layout toolbars. And, the Window menu allows disabling the tabbed multi-document interface and tiling the Design Panel windows vertically or horizontally.

Toolbox

Allows users to add controls to a report, by dragging and dropping their icons onto a report's area.

Report Explorer Panel

Represents the visual tree of a report. It shows a report's structure in a tree form and makes navigation through the report easy.

Field List Panel

Shows the structure of a report's data source and is used to bind report controls to data.

Property Grid Panel

Used to access and modify properties of a report and all its elements (bands and controls).

Design Panel

This is the Designer's main element, as it represents a surface where a report is being edited and previewed. The Design Panel has four tabs; (Designer, Preview, HTML View and Scripts), for report editing, previewing, and maintaining its scripts.

Component Tray

Shows components (non-visual report helpers) related to report data binding. You can click them to display and edit their settings using the Property Grid.

Group and Sort Panel

Allows you to quickly perform grouping and sorting operations throughout a report, and visually represents the report's grouping structure.

Toolbars

Includes Main Toolbar, Formatting Toolbar, Layout Toolbar, and Zoom Toolbar; each represent all functionalities from main menu available in the fast and convenient way for designing your report.

Displaying Data

There are two main options for displaying data in the view report. Using the Report Designer itself is good when showing either a lot of data or just a few columns. The other option is the iConstruct Table Control which is good for having multiple tables on the view when there is only a small amount of data to be shown (or summary information).

Option 1 - Report Designer:

When Import Properties is checked, all the properties for the visible items in the view are extracted into a table. This table is then linked to the ViewPoint data.

To be able to add rows to the view for the related data a sub report must be added. To do this, right click in the Detail section of the standard report, then click Insert Detail Report and choose Object Data Fields for the properties or Comments Data Fields if comment information for the view is required.

"Option 1" "Option 1"

Once the sub report has been inserted it can be grouped or sorted independently of the main report.

Note: for the report to work correctly the required fields must be dragged from the relevant table name beneath the ViewData table.

Option 2 - Table Control:

The iConstruct Table control gives the ability to add custom tables based on the visible model data to the view report. The first pre-requisite for this is that Import Properties is enabled.

Coming soon...

View Per Folder

When View Per Folder is enabled the view processing behaves differently. Instead of producing one view per page all views per folder are included per page. The folder considered per page is the last folder in the hierarchy ie if a user has a folder structure like below, the views will be grouped by the Activity folders.

"View Per Folder"

The number of images per page will reflect the highest number found per folder. So in this case there will be 4 images per view. Folders that have less than this will still use the same page template, but some image fields will be empty.

Once the designer has launched with the standard report, the default view is visible – this viewpoint should be deleted as we are going to add the multiple viewpoints for the page. To add the new viewpoints, simply drag & drop each of the FolderImage fields into the page. Arrange the views depending on the maximum number of viewpoints. In the case below there are 4 viewpoints.

"View Per Folder"

Once the viewpoints have been added, resized and arranged, there are a couple of extra settings that should be made to the viewpoint Picture Box controls. Firstly all the picture box controls Sizing mode need to be set to Zoom Image, and secondly if preferred a border can be drawn around the control by setting the Borders property to All.

"View Per Folder"

There is a corresponding ViewName version for each of the FolderImage fields – these are used to indicate the view names.

"View Per Folder" "View Per Folder"