Manual · The book

Reports & printing

The report editor, form letters, labels — and printing from a list.

One printing engine

Everything printed goes through reports — the invoice, the form letter, the label sheet, and the quick print from any list. One engine means one look: what the developer designed is what every road prints.

The editor

A report is bands — page header, group headers, one band per record, a footer that can total. Drag fields in, follow relationships in a path (customer.town), place computed values, set the page. The editor works on real records, so what you see is what prints. reports.openEditor(records, "Name") opens it from a script.

The report editor: bands down the left, the page in the middle, grouping on the right — Bands with their heights down the left, real field paths on the page — and the grouping field, which always sorts first so a group cannot be torn apart.

A chart on the page

A chart is an object like any other — drop it into a band, tell it what to group by, and it is drawn where it stands. The values are counted by the database, not by loading records: the same arithmetic that feeds a chart on a form. In the editor it draws stand-in data, so you are deciding whether it fits before the first real page is printed.

A report with a chart band under the totals, drawn with stand-in data — Bands with a chart among them — grouped by the same field the report groups by, and drawn with stand-in figures until it meets real ones.

Form letters and labels

A letter is a report over people — one band per record, the address block from their fields, your text between. Labels are a page grid; the example project ships both (a letter to the company and one to the person at it), worth opening and taking apart.

Two shelves

Reports you ship live inside the application and are read-only for the end user; their own live beside their data in Application Support and survive every update. The report manager shows both, with the padlock on yours — and Duplicate is the one door between the shelves.

The report manager: the shipped reports, the end user's own, and a live preview — Both shelves in one window, and the preview is the report itself — the four buttons live under the list they act on.

From a script, and from every list

reports.print("Invoice", [form.record]) prints; every list's Print row action opens the report manager with the shown records — which is why there is no second, lesser “quick table print” to keep in step with the real one.