Report Designer

Report Designer

The designer provides the user with all the tools necessary for designing and previewing reports. The designer’s interface meets current requirements. It contains several toolbars, which can be docked wherever wanted. These toolbar locations are restored every time the designer is opened. Toolbar locations, together with other designer settings, are stored in the registry.

The report designer is the window in which we can edit/format the reports.

It consists of the following parts (as shown in the picture):

1 – report design workspace

2 – menu bar

3 – toolbars

4 – object toolbar

5 – report page tabs

6 – “Report tree” pane

7 – “Object inspector” pane

8 – “Data tree” pane : elements can be dragged from this pane onto a report page

9 – rulers: a ruler can be dragged onto a report page to create a blue guideline on the page (objects snap to nearby guidelines)

10 – status bar

It consists of at least three tabs:
 

• tab Code, on which program code is written

• tab Data, on which datasets are created

• one or more tabs with a page name (Page1...), where we design a report
   

Menu Options

The most important menu options are:

• File | Preview - here we open a preview of the report. It can also be opened by pressing the combination of the Ctrl + P keys.

Open preview is only suitable for design review, because in rare cases the data is not correct. Certain procedures in the program code are not executed.

• File | Page Settings... -  here we define the page settings. We also access them in the object inspector.
• View | Toolbars... - Here we determine which toolbars are visible.

It may happen that the position of the Report tree, Object inspector, Data tree, Memo, Expression editor, SQL editor and Variable editor are changed and displayed outside of the screen. This is possible in case of using different sizes of monitors. In this case, it will appear that the program has stopped working (frozen). In this case use option which is accessible in menu 'Desktop | Reset Layout' which resets the coordinates all above windows. All Pantheon forms are then closed when using Reset Layout.