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Adding Controls

Adding Report Designer Controls to a Report

 

There are various types of controls that can be added to a report. Controls are added to a report by selecting the control in the Toolbox and dragging and dropping the control onto the report design canvas. You can also select the control and then place your mouse on the design canvas and then right-click and hold your left mouse button while you drag a rectangle where you want the control to be.  While details for these controls can be found on the Data Dynamics website, a few key controls (and their properties) are worth highlighting here.
 

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TextBox Control – The Textbox control is the primary control used to represent data on a report.

  • DataField Property – The DataField property is set to the name of the data point in the data source the textbox should be bound to. In the case of SI5 reports, all reports are bound to an XML data source. This field should be set to a relative path based on the Recordset pattern of the Datasource. There are a number of ways to accomplish this. The first (and most painful) is to manually type the relative XPath into the DataField properties value. There are two easier methods:
    • If the user has added to Textbox from the Toolbar, they can use the “Data Explorer” Window to select the proper node in the XML data structure, right click on the node, select “Copy DataField” from the context menu, click on the DataField property in the Properties Window, right click and select “Paste”.
    • The second way to correctly set this value is to simply select the proper node in the Data Explorer Window and drag and drop it onto the Report Design Canvas. This will automatically create a Textbox control on the design surface in the location where the node was dropped and set the DataField property of the newly created Textbox to the correct relative path.

 

File:Si5Wiki/SI5/10Reports/05Designer/Adding_Controls/datafield.jpg

  • OutputFormat Property – The OutputFormat property is used to apply a specific format to the value of the textbox. Common formats include formatting for currency and dates. In the existing reports if one sees “C” as the property of this value, it denotes that the value will be formatted as currency. While the format can also be set to “$0.00”, using the letter “C” allows the formatting to adjust based on the regional settings of the computers operating system. If the user has the regional settings to English/US, then the currency will be formatted as dollars, but if they have the regional settings set to English/United Kingdom, the currency will be formatted automatically as British Pounds.  The same concept applies to fields where the OutputFormat is set to “d”. This automatically applies the computers short date format to the value. This accommodates the differences in countries where the date is written as day/month/year as opposed to the US formatting of month/day/year.

File:Si5Wiki/SI5/10Reports/05Designer/Adding_Controls/output_format.jpg

 

  • SummaryFunc Property – A list of functions that may be applied to the values of a textbox control for summing, counting, averaging, etc. values
  • Summary Running Property – Value to determine whether summary values will be accumulated or reset for each level.
  • SummaryType Property – Sets the Type of summary to be performed on the values for this field. Valid options are (From the Data Dynamics documentation):
    • GrandTotal - Summary function for all records in the report.
    • PageTotal - Summary function for all records on a page.
    • SubTotal – Summary function for all records in a group level.
    • PageCount – Print the page count or page number. Use with “SummaryRunning” set to All to print the page number.
  • SummaryGroup – Name of the group used to reset the summary value when the textbox control is calculating subtotals. This property is only used when the SummaryType property is set to “SubTotal”.

 

File:Si5Wiki/SI5/10Reports/05Designer/Adding_Controls/summary_function.jpg

 

Label Control – Used to create static text in a report.

RichTextBox Control – Allows Rich text documents to be loaded into a report.

SubReport Control – Links, loads, and executes a report as part of the main report. Subreport controls can be hard to see in the report designer as they are represented by a light gray box on the report design canvas. It can be easier to select sub reports in the report layout by using the “Report Explorer”.

 

 

 
 
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