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Tony Coffman
Mar 8, 2019

Basic Finished Reports Step by Step

Hello Community,


I wanted to share a basic Finished Reports build out with you all. Please feel free to ask any questions or share you own ideas.



8 comments
david.espinda
Mar 8, 2019

Great video Tony. Thanks. Maybe as an add on you can cover what it looks like when you have a finished report attached to a view, and how it can be exported/saved. Also, what are your thoughts on creating templates with standard colors, fonts etc so reports are consistent in overall design, especially of you have marketing specific palates etc?

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Tony Coffman
Mar 8, 2019

Thank you, Dave.

When it comes to a Finished Report (FR) we can think of it as a "piece" of a View, much like the Data Grids, Charts and Visualize. An FR cannot exist without it's associated View and when a View is saved all of its components, including the FR are saved within the single .vdm file.


Once the FR is created for a View it can easily be accessed by a user by clicking the Finished Reports Viewer. The FR designer is what we used to create the FR or make changes and updates. The Finished Reports Viewer is a read only control that puts the user directly into preview mode. We recommend that users looking to simply run a View for the Finished Report, use the Finished Reports Viewer. An existing Finished Report can be accessed using the Finished Reports Viewer, by clicking either these navigation options:



When the user clicks the FR Viewer they'll see this:


From the FR Preview, they can export, email, print, search, zoom etc their Finished Report.


Another fun fact is that you can set the Default Control for a View. When a user opens and runs the view the first time they will be taken directly to the Default Control. When Finished Reports is selected the Finished Reports Viewer is used.



Lastly, with regards to templates, we refer to them as Style Sheets. They can be setup and configured under the XtraReport Report / Style Sheet property:



With Style Sheets you can define default Background Colors, Fonts, Borders and more. What we commonly recommend is a Style Sheet is created and then exported. Each new FR you create you'll import the Style Sheet to get you going.



One last tidbit. Finished Reports objects can be copied from one session to another. This means you can have one Finished Report Designer up on your left monitor and another on your right monitor and the copy and paste the objects (labels, images, fields etc) from one report to another.


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gregory_preston
Mar 9, 2019

Well written Tony. Can you do a similar writeup for creating a dashboard with auto-refresh? Thank you!

Tony Coffman
Mar 9, 2019

Thank you, Greg. Are you more interested in the traditional Dashboard feature or our next generation dashboarding tool we call Visualize? Both support auto refresh.

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gregory_preston
Mar 9, 2019

Are there any advantages/disadvantages between the two? Perhaps starting there would be best.

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Tony Coffman
Mar 11, 2019

I created a new post to help explain the difference between Dashboards and Visualize https://www.forums.bridgeworksllc.com/forum/report-writers-united/dashboards-or-visualize. we'll work on getting walkthroughs put together sometime this week.

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Tony Coffman
Mar 9, 2019

Absolutely and I’ll explain the difference. I’ll put together a video overview next week and post it on the forum.

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david.espinda
Mar 11, 2019

Visualize is much more flexible now..looking forward to the next vid!