The Reports Designer

The Reports Designer can be started from the Tools menu or by right-clicking any table header. Here I used the 'country' table from the sample project.

The designer contains the main panel 'Panel'. This contains cells. Inside any cell, we can place other panels or tables, with their own cells, etc. Like this, we can build a hierarchy of tables and panels. Different panels and tables are using different colors (green, blue, etc.).

Our report contains a panel and a table. The table is placed in one of the panel cells. This cell is merged on the right with the other cells from the same row. Empty cells are marked with a solid line, and cells having a component with a dotted line.

We can edit the table properties and the data source by clicking the blue label 'Table'.

Right-clicking the chart cell you can add other rows or columns. You can select multiple cells and merge them.

Empty cells are marked with a solid line. Click one of them and the Component Palette will show on the right. Here you can choose new components to be created: charts, labels (text), buttons, text fields, combo boxes, radio buttons, etc.

Similar to a chart, you can create reports. This report was created using the 'offices' table wizard.

A sheet may access another sheet using buttons.

Sheets can be open as dialogs. They also have an initialization script that can be used, for example, to modify data in the database. The input variables are used to make sure some variables are received from the caller sheet. If a variable is missing, you can configure an exception to be thrown.

From the wizard you can create master-detail reports. In the image below, we list offices with their employees.

As we can see, there are two tables imbricated one in another.

The first table data source query is:

SELECT * FROM "PUBLIC".offices

And the second table data source query is:

select * from employees where `officeCode`='${officeCode}'

The queries are parsed using Groovy templates, where the ${...} and <%....%> are considered Java expressions. These expressions are receiving the data from the parent containers (tables, panels) data source queries as variables. The officeCode variable is generated by the first table data source query and is used in the WHERE clause of the child table data source query. Notice the quotes: '${officeCode}', as this is a string in the query.

From the Wizard you can choose to create a chart. The chart needs to be configured and is not yet visible. Click the red cell in the designer to configure the chart.

Configure the chart axis variables. We can drag the name and population variables to the axis values.

Here I changed the chart type to 'Pie' and I edited the data source script to order the countries by population, with a limit of 20 countries. Press 'Apply' and you should see the chart below.

The data source looks like this:

From the menu, you can choose to view the chart in the system browser. Also, you can press the 'Design' button to leave the design mode.