The Standard Report Designer

Creating reports can be very complex and time consuming. The Basic Report Designer hides the more technical details while still giving you control over the output to the printer. Some of these quite technical details that are hidden include:

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Constructing the database queries to make the data available to the report. Each report has its own unique way of communicating to the server the data which is relevant to that report. An Invoice report requires different data to a Purchase Order.

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Calculating data. Very often you will want a report to calculate the data it has retrieved before it displays itself on the screen ready for printing. For example, you may want to total all the invoices raised over the last year. The database does not store the "Total For the Year" figure, only the amount for each invoice. The Report Designer gathers the data and performs this calculation. All the reports in Rental Desk have some form of calculated information in them.

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Sorting and grouping. In addition to Page Headers and Footers, reports have Data Headers and Data Footers. This allows the layout of information in an easy to understand and organised way. For example, in a Quotation report you might want to have a heading for each MasterCategory of equipment and for all the equipment in each MasterCategory to appear under its heading. Moreover, you may want the MasterCategory headings to appear in the exact sort order that you set up in the Equipment Book.

As these details and functions have been hidden, the result is some limitations. These limitations correspond to the three complex areas listed above:

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You cannot create a new report, you can only modify and existing report which can then be saved with a different name. This allows you to quickly produce, say, two types of Quotation report.

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Although you can insert simple calculations, such as a Sub-Total Price for each MasterCategory of equipment in a quotation, you cannot do complex data massaging such as "don't print the first character of an item's description if it begins with &". Many of the text objects and fields in the standard reports already have special calculations associated with them "behind the scenes"; for this reason we don't let you delete them since you would have no way of putting them back.

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Grouping and Sorting cannot be changed. However, it is possible to assign sort orders in the main program and the report will use these.