Valentina Reports FAQ

1) Valentina Server is totally FREE for 5 connections. Everybody can get own named license file. Valentina Server is two in one: DB Server + Report Server. This fact opens to everybody Valentina Report engine, even in multi-user mode!

But to design reports you need a copy of Valentina Studio Pro ($199).

2) Valentina Report ADK as client to Valentina Server is always FREE. You can even develop few applications using different ADKs (e.g. VPHP, VNET, ObjC, …) that will work around VServer.

1) Valentina Studio ($199) - to design reports.
2) Valentina Report ADK ($199 - $399) - to embed local Valentina Report engine into your application.
3) Valentina Server - more connections if needed ($300 - $1500).
4) VDN - Valentina Embedded Server ($599) if you want to deploy a Valentina Server with your application.

Yes of course.

1) Valentina Studio – without PRO serial is able

• create a new .vsp file (local or on vserver), but it will create a RAM-table for reports. As result, reports will not be saved to disk. All rest works and can be touched. You can create few reports, design them, connect to datasources, see preview, … Well, preview will have DEMO watermark also.
• open an existed .vsp file and work with it, but you cannot create new reports there.

2) Valentina Server - you can get a free license of VServer with 5 connects, and use it as DB Server + Report Server, as with VStudio, so with ADKs.

3) Valentina ADK - without serials in the Valentina.InitReports() will generate reports with watermark “DEMO”, but you can write and test your code.

• Each Valentina ADK have few examples of reports with prepared .vsp files.
• If you want to prepare own .vsp file with own reports, then (!!!) you need do this with the help of Valentina Server, because in this way you can create new .vsp file and reports using VStudio and then connect from ADK application to use them, because your reports will live until VServer restart.
• Note, that VServer in this case just helps to workaround limits of DEMO mode of VStudio. If you already have VStudio Pro license then you can just create own .vsp file and test it from ADK app.

Start to read Valentina Reports Overview. Then,

• You need to learn how create, design and test reports in Valentina Studio Pro. Read details in the Valentina Studio documentation related to reports:
  • Project Window Help
  • Valentina Reports

• If you going to use Valentina Reports ADK to enable your application work with Valentina Reports, then you need check Valentina ADK API, in particular, two classes: VProject and VReport.

YES. Report itself by default is database-independent. You can design report using e.g. mySQL tables, but later witch to PostgreSQL. For report it is important only to get cursor that have fields with same names and compatible types.

* [TIP] If needed, you can force other DB to be similar using SELECT fld as 'CorrectName' syntax in the query.

* EXCEPTION from this rule is case, when you change property of a report to use SQL of Datasource instead of Valentina SQL. In this case you become able to use specific SQL commands of your datasource DB, for example PostgreSQL, but it is obvious that such report will not work with mySQL or others.

YES of course.

To support this each Valentina ADK have two classes

• VProject - to open Valentina Project .vsp file and manage reports
• VReport - to produce report as PDF or other format.

Also Valentina offers extended SELECT command as SELECT … FOR REPORT to produce cursor with BLOB field, which contains result report. This feature allows to use reports even by clients, which do not have VProject/VReport classes, e.g. by ODBC driver.

In the vcomponents folder VREPORT.DLL presents, which is a runtime Report Engine.

NO. Report is designed in the Valentina Studio Pro and application via ADK can only use it as is, providing some dataset.

Valentina Reports have conditions in controls, this allows to make flexible enough templates that change behavior depending on data.

Only if user have own Valentina Studio Pro license.

Nothing hard. Just open your existed .vsp file and make new report(s). If you need change code of app depends how you have code it.

No, but you can insert values of this array into a TMP table (it can be also TMP+RAM table) of a database and use that table as data source for report.

Because this is the most flexible and general solution.

Valentina Studio needs datasource and some SQL query to be able show you PREVIEW of your report. And yes this info is saved into .vsp file to allow you do development between starts of VStudio.

But image now, that you deploy your application to 100 users, which may have 100 own database files, with different names and different locations on their HDD. Or your application can use even different DB Servers to get data for reports. So of course your application must specify Datasource for report engine.

Same story with SQL query. Usually users will want to use different datasets to generate your reports. This means that at least WHERE part of the query will differ.

No. It is enough just provide path to that db. Valentina Reports engine self will open SQLite local db if needed, and later will close it.

For each ADK in the Valentina Wiki presents a section with Manual. In a manual presents section “Deployment” where instruction and (may be) helper scripts are given.

Let us give few points to answer this.

• Most archives of Valentina ADK contains platform specific libraries. This means that usually, a MAC archive do not have windows and linux libraries.
• For cross-platform tools like REAL Studio and LiveCode, it is possible compile executable of application for other platforms. But still it is required to use archives for other platforms to get libraries for other platforms and copy them into App folder.
• To extract libraries from archives for other OS, usually it needs to have that OS, as true computer or as virtual machine.
• Do not consider this as a big problem, because with sure you need to have that OSes to be able test/debug your application before send to users.

Yes. This is why we have mechanism of registration of a project (as well as a database) to Valentina Server.

You need to drop .vsp file into the “VServer/projects” folder and register it to VServer using either GUI of Valentina Studio or SQL command “REGISTER PROJECT”.

NO. Because:

• Valentina Server contains vreport.dll, which is Valentina report engine. This allow to Valentina Server be 2 in 1: DB Server + Report Server.
• Valentina Server have special protocol commands to work with reports;
• Valentina Server have speial SQL commands to work with reports;
• VREPORT.DLL is linked to VKERNEL.DLL and uses its powerful features to generate reports.

Advantages are GREAT!

• You have a single place where reports are stored, so future you can easy change .vsp file by a newer one. Image you deploy solution to a school with 1 vserver and 100 clients around. It is much simpler to replace .vsp file on a single computer than on 100.
• You can have thing client which connects to VServer and gets generated report as PDF/JPG/…
• Development team can do collective work around single Valentina Project.

Let us remind that Valentina Server is a standalone application with embedded Valentina Kernel Engine and Valentina Report Engine. These engines present in the vserver/vcomponents folder as vkernel.dll and vreport.dll.

Your application also includes vcomponents folder, although you can remove vkernel and vreport DLLs if you want only vclient app. But if you do not remove them, then your application also contains report engine.

So answer is: you can tune your solution in both way:

• client-side reports.
• server-side reports.

For client-side reports your app must include vreport.dll in vcomponents. In this case your app can open local .vsp file and then app/vreport.dll will talk to a remote DB Servers to get data from them and generate VReport using this cursor as data source. App/vcomponents/report.dll will do the job.

For server-side reports, vsp file is located in vserver/projects folder and is opened by vserver itself. Your app can be a thing vclient (without vkernel and vreport dlls), so it should ask VServer to generate a report.

In both cases the same code is used. Only 2 lines difference how you open project file: by a local path or by name using VConnection.

It is the only way for a client to get report from VServer if client cannot use VProject/VReport classes from native Valentina API. In particular, Valentina ODBC driver provides to client only SQL to communicate.

YES. Valentina Reports engine is linked very tight to VKERNEL.DLL.

For example, it uses:

1. ICU unicode library to work with unicode strings and do formatting of output.
2. SQL engine to calculate expressions for report fields
3. …

Use “margin_top” and “margin_bottom” properties of the report in the Property Inspector.

Expression fields can be used for it:

• SQL expression: =CONCAT( “f1”, “f2”)
• Macro expression: $F(f1)$F(f2)

Open “format” group in the Property Inspector. Set “kind” to one of the date-related kinds, detailed description: Report Editor - Formatting Date and Time Help.
Values of date and time fields are always printed using system locale settings.

There are two approaches:

• Use appropriate border buttons on the “Common” tab of the main toolbar to turn on/off borders
• Use line control

If a line control was used to draw a grid, then it is easy to change it's visibility via “print_if” property, depending on some condition.

Just add one more summary field, into, for example, report footer area.