Tutorial for Designing Your First Custom Report

This help section gives you step by step instructions to create your first custom report and understand the basic work-flow. You are recommended to avoid changing any settings that are not mentioned here until you complete the tutorial.

Before starting to design a new custom report, make sure that you have already created at least one catalog with multiple data fields and a sample record.

How to Design a Basic Customized Report?

1. Click "Design" from main menu, select "Report Manager",
2. Create here the new report and select there a catalog as the source of data,
3. Select the new report and click "Design",
4. By default, you will be looking initially to a page section of 3 cm height. Note that this section will be printed repeatedly throughout the page for each record in case you print more than 1 record. You may increase the height of the section by clicking "Section Properties" button if you need more space per record to fit the data.
5. On left-down side of the window, you will see the "Object Box" with a list of all existing data fields of the report catalog, click each desired field and then drag it to the desired location of the page. Note that, the label on left side is the field header and will be printed as is. The box containing the field header on right side is actually representing the data and will be replaced by the actual data in your record when the printout is generated.
6. If you right click an item you have placed into the section and select "properties", a window will be opened where you may adjust various display options for that item.
7. You may drag and drop each item on the page section until you get the desired appearance.
8. You may also add some non-data items from the "Object Box" under the "Decoration" folder to decorate your report.
9. Click "Report Preview" button to check how the final result looks. A sample report will be generated from existing records in your database.
10. Click "Save & Exit" button to save your design changes to the template.

1. Display the records of the catalog for which you have created the new report,
2. Select one or more records, click "Print" button from toolbar,
3. On print window, select the report template you have created,
   * If you do not see the template name in the list, it means that, you have created the report for a different catalog than the one you are attempting to print records from. A report cannot be generated for the records of a catalog until you have created a report template designed for that catalog.
4. Click "print preview" to check the report before actually printing it.

How to Design a Report with Relational Data?

This type of report can only be designed if you have already created a relationship between two or more catalogs.
In this example, assume that we have already setup a 1 to multi relationship between a "parent" catalog (e.g. customer) and "child" catalog (e.g. orders).

Before continuing, make sure that the parent catalog has at least one record as well as one or more relational records so you can preview the report with actual data.

1. Create a new report as described above for the parent catalog,
2. Open report designer window for this report,
3. Design the default section by placing the necessary data items for the parent catalog,
4. At the bottom of the "Page Sections" box on left side, you will see 4 small buttons, click the first button to create a new page section, a window to select "section type" will be opened,
5. In the section type list, you should see available relational data sections in the following format:
   "DATA > PARENT CATALOG NAME > RELATED CATALOG NAME"
   If you do not see such a line, this means that you did not have created any 1-Multi type relationship for the main catalog of this report yet. You must do it first.
6. Select the desired relational data section and click "OK",
7. This will open the section properties window, adjust the following settings only and leave others unchanged for now:
   - Select "Preferred View", which will determine the filtering rule to be used to include related records.
   - Adjust section height if you prefere to allocate more or less space for each related record data.
8. Select the new relational data section you just created from "Page Sections" box,
9. Design the relational data section by placing the necessary data items just like before,
10. Click "Report Preview" button to check how the final result looks.
11. Click "Save & Exit" button to save your design changes to the template.

1. Display the records of the "parent" catalog for which you have created the new report,
2. Select one or more records, click "Print" button from toolbar,
3. On print window, select the report template you have created,
4. Click "print preview" to check the report before actually printing it.