Designing complex reports

kklosson · Post by **kklosson** » Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:54 am

Still on trial license and I'm just getting into the report designer. My need is to print a report of a primary object with about 100+ attributes. At times, I will want to print small lists of related objects, obviously using an embedded report. The problem I am seeing it that in the designer, I have to keep everything within the confines of the physical page when in fact, my report is just a rambler. I don't care where things end up so long as they're in the order specified.

Is it possible to use the embed report function to "chain" to another report? My experiments with this indicate no.

I also looked at using MS Word and the LIST_TABLE function - couldn't get that to work. On file import, I got squawk about using apostrophes so I instead used the ` (under the ~key) as suggested which the configurator accepted but which did not print anything.

Questions:

1. Can reports be chained?
2. For this type of complex report do you think I'm better off with a report document or a Word document?

aware_support2 · Post by **aware_support2** » Wed Dec 03, 2008 6:45 am

Both report and Word template produce paginated documents (therefore suitable for printing) and are capable of iterating over multiple object instances. Reports are generated as PDF files, which unlike Word documents are non-editable and more universally accepted. This may influence your choice of the template type.

If the number of attributes for a single object is large and cannot fit on a single page in a report, the solution is to create separate smaller reports, each for a subset of the attributes. Then you can include each of the separate reports as a sub-report into the main report. A new page will be automatically opened when the report is generated if the contents cannot fit on the current page.

Alternatively, you may increase the size of the main report to fit all of the attributes on a single page. This, however, would result in a non-standard page that may not print properly.

You can also include sub-reports that iterate over multiple (usually related) object instances. Please see the Member Details report in the Library sample application for an example.

In Word templates you can use functions like SUB_DOCUMENT and LIST_TABLE. Both have been successfully used in a number of applications including a complex document with conditional inclusion of many subdocuments and related objects. Please refer to the User Guide for details on how to use the functions.

kklosson · Post by **kklosson** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 12:02 am

Thanks. I believe you've answered my question. The report formatter seems designed to construct classic banded reports with an occasional embedded report for child tables (invoice type). My report would employe probably several embedded reports and just to add them, I would need more space than the formatter would allow. It seems the report formatter would have no trouble with this except that at design-time I just can't fit it all on a single page and there are limitations within it to keep the content within the scale of a page. I think this is rather constraining. It seems to me you should be able to declare the page size and then add all of the detail you want to the detail and other bands and allow the report to manage page overflow just as you described.

aware_support2 · Post by **aware_support2** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 12:36 am

You can make the height of sub-report elements quite small (smaller than the actual height of the sub-reports) when placing them into the main report in the report designer. This way you can fit many sub-reports within a band. When the report is generated the system will allocate sufficient space for each sub-report based on its design and the number of iterations.

kklosson · Post by **kklosson** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 1:17 am

I'm afraid my report requirements will vastly exceed the space provided in a single page.

aware_support2 · Post by **aware_support2** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 2:07 am

You should be able to fit a lot of sub-reports if you make the sub-report element height really small, say 10 points or less.

kklosson · Post by **kklosson** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 2:19 am

Nope,

The problem is I have about 200 attributes to print out including intermingled embedded reports.

aware_support2 · Post by **aware_support2** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 4:34 am

You should be able to do it by placing subsets of attributes into multiple sub-reports as described in the second post in this thread. The sub-reports may include further nested sub-reports as necessary.

kklosson · Post by **kklosson** » Wed Dec 02, 2009 2:56 am

My post applies to the thread above. I have a report that I use as a Master report which contains several sub reports. Some of the sub reports also contain sub reports. Some of the sub reports contain attributes in the detail band followed by a sub report followed by by more attributes. My experience is that I have trouble keeping items in the order I've placed them. Each sub report is in order in the detail section of my master report but when printed I get sub reports in different order and sometimes with an odd breakpoint. I have no way of understanding what it's doing. My expectation is that all items should simply follow the order in which I've placed them. But I'm not getting that.

If you understand my issue, can you advise what I might do to ensure that all of my report attributes and sub reports print in the correct order?