--- Till Bandi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I seem not to understand how to use the Report > Builder. (I also did not > find enough help in the documentation). Is there > somewhere a tutorial > or could anyone give me an example stack where I for > instance can see > how one can print labels ( in an A4 page)? > > Thanks for any hints, Till >
Hi Till, The Report Builder seems a mistery to quite a few people. Here's what I found out : - the starting point is that there will be two stacks, and that the data in the 'report' stack comes from the fields in what we'll simply call the 'source' stack ; - in the 'report' stack, which will hold the layout for the report, and you will add report objects, which you then link to the fields in the source stack by using the 'Magic wand' ; - upon printing time, the report builder will copy the content of the fields from the source stack into the report stack, and print the card ; going through all the cards in the source stack that fall within your print selection criteria. So let's start a little experiment, using two new stacks. The first will be our source stack, the latter will be our report stack. In the Source stack, add 2 fields "Name" and "Memo" ; group them, and use the Inspector palette to turn on 'Background Behavior' Now create a few cards, filling in data into the fields so we can check if everything works. Now go to the report stack, and create two report objects ; then use the Inspector palette to link one report object to the field "Name" and the other to the field "Memo". Note that when you click the "Apply" button, the report object resizes to mimick the size of the source field. Of course you can add the whole range of graphics, images and other items such as label fields to your layout, providing the static surroundings. Now use the 'View' menu, sub-menu 'Go to report page' to move around to the next, first, last page, etc. Lo' and behold, the two report object fields are updated automatically to reflect the data in the source fields. Remember I told you that clicking the "Apply" button would copy the original field settings ? Well now comes the fun part : resize the report object, and play with the settings in the panel "Text formatting" (for example, set the alignment to center and set its style to bold). The data in the original fields will not be affected, but when you move around in your report stack via the 'View' menu, everything is updated correctly. Note that any style information at chunk level is not carried over. While you were in the report object Inspector palette, you must have noticed the "Formatting options" option menu. This allows you to automagically format the copied data, in all sorts of manners. Another intriguing option in that regards is linking your report object to a 'table' style field, and apply several formatting options to either an entire column, or individual chunks. Other advanced uses are the 'Label' functionality, which allows you to make a small report stack, and set the gutters between the labels, so you can print, say 8 rows of 3 labels, corresponding to 24 cards in the source stack. You can also create separate 'header' and 'footer' stacks, the content of which you can print (quite unsurprisingly) at the top and bottom of each page. Especially handy in this regard is the fact that as these are separate stacks, you can easily reuse them in other reports. Integrating the report builder with the database query builder is a different story : basically, you'll have to first populate a separate stack with the data from your MySQL database, and then print the report with objects linked to this separate data stack. Not the most elegant of solutions, but it works ; and I'm sure we'll see many an improvement in the reporting area in the future. In the meantime, the current report builder has its uses, once you get to terms with its innards. Hope this clarified things a bit ; don't hesitate to poke me for more information. Jan Schenkel. ===== "As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time." (La Rochefoucauld) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/ _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
