What is REPORT

The Report Writer is ITAS´s report building tool. It is used to create and amend custom report templates. It is also used to print existing reports. Customisation covers both the content of the report and the layout and style of the report. Contents are called report elements. Elements can be either text (entered by the user upon building the report template) or database records that can be accessed from the available tables. Layouts are defined by distributing the elements in the different regions of the report (Headers, Details, Footers and Others). Styles are defined by selecting for each content the font size and type. Once a report template is created it can be saved and named for use in the future, see how to use Report, especially for the specialised Rules listing.

A normal report structure has one or more report titles (free format text), several report headings (free format text that serve as a column headers) and under each heading a corresponding detail (database information). Details when building a report are represented by a field element that holds the description of the associated record type to be accessed from the database. When reports are actually executed the detail list under each header can contain many records. Titles and headings are represented by a text element.

The Report Writer presents two windows associated with the two main functions of the program: The first window is used to select and print existing reports. Certain report presentation features can be altered from this window before printing (e.g. font size, # of headings). The second window is used to create report templates where all the customisation features are available.

Technical note: New tables for use in REPORT are set up using IDD (mouse right-click feature)