Report Designer
Complex reports for business solutions
Printing job plays an important role in the development of business solutions.
Report Designer is an easy, powerful tool for developing reports which
can be accessed, viewed, and printed from your application program. Reporter
is a "what you see is what you get" designer. Being a component of Visual
Programming Armoury it is available as a standalone application. The report
building process is simplified by providing a graphical interface that
lets you point and click to define fields, lines, boxes, pictures and nested
subreports. You can include graphic images and format text elements using
a variety of font types, justification and borders. The report template
you design does not contain the actual data. It contains all the information
report client needs to format and present the data you provide through
callback technique.
Not tied to a single source of data
Report Designer is different from other report generators in that it is
not tied to a single source of data. This makes it a highly flexible tool
for generating reports because it accepts and uses data originating directly
from your applications. The input data is not stored with your template.
You must provide the data each time you print or preview your report. This
data comes from an external source, that is, from an application program
or from sample data for test purposes. Since reporter is not dependent
on a single source of input data, it is possible for you to develop and
test your templates and applications independently of each other.
Event-driven functionality
You can use Visual Programming Armoury to develop applications that access
and use databases. These applications can access and use the report templates
you build in reporter. The data provided by your application is processed
and is used to populate field and picture objects. Small API with comprehensive
set of functions and classes helps to interact between application program
and report layer. There are traditional ReportServer and ReportClient agents
which both run in application context and communicate each other. On receiving
message from ReportServer ReportClient provides so-calles input variables
to format and use while processing the template.