Report Editor - Overview

Report Editor is a visual report authoring tool that allows you to create visually rich reports by linking queries to controls and also adding additional visual elements.

Creating a report with Report Editor involves specifying a data source, defining what data to collect, and the visual element to display the data. This information is stored in a Valentina Project (vsp) file.

Valentina Projects can be used within several different products:

• Valentina Studio. Preview and print reports created by others
• Valentina Studio Pro. Build, modify, preview and print your reports
• Valentina Reports ADK. Embed the Valentina Reports engine into desktop applications
• Valentina Server. Upload Valentina Projects for server applications

A new report appears in Report Editor with several empty areas that you can populate with visual objects:

In a Valentina Project (.vsp file) can be saved many reports. You can open one or few such reports in its own TAB-panel with Report Editor.

TAB-panel with a modified report have the star “*” before the name of panel, so you can see that this report should be saved. You can save it using standard command SAVE with shortcut CMD+S, or SAVE ALL (CMD+SHIFT+S).

Report Editor Toolbar implemented in modern Ribbon GUI style (aka tabbed toolbar).

From Wikipedia page: “The Ribbon GUI provides the user interface of an application with a large toolbar filled with graphical representations of control elements which are grouped by different functionality. The Ribbon can also contain tabs to expose different sets of control elements, eliminating the need for many different icon-based tool bars. Some of these tabs are contextual and appear only when a certain type of object is selected, providing specific tools for items such as tables or images.”

You can read detailed description of each button of the Report Editor Toolbar here

The left side of Report Editor has two tab-panels: Controls and Fields.

• Controls - this tab-panel contains the list of available controls to be used for report design.
• Fields - this tab-panel contains the list of fields from the result Cursor of an SQL query provided for this report.

The Controls list have a few sub-groups:

• Common - the list of common controls to be used in the report, such as: barcodes, shapes, charts, labels, sub-reports and so on.
• Text Fields - the list of controls that produce a text string as result.

In the central part of the Report Editor you can see the white area to design a report layout. When you click white are you effectivelly select a report object itself. In the inspector you will see properties of this report. You also can do right click on this white area to see contextual menu for report object.

You can change vertical size of this white area by mouse dragging grey line at its bottom.

To change horizontal size of the white are, you need choose paper format in the inspector. Note, that to see properties of report, you may need to click the white area.

You can see horizontal and vertical rulers that display the numbers in the current measurement units. When you select some object on the report layout, rulers will display its size as highlighted areas.

You can hide/show rulers from menu Report → View or from the toolbar's tab “View”.

On the left top corner of the report layout you can see a small button that opens a menu to specify units of rulers (cm, mm, inches, pixels, …).

The white area of the report layout can show grid – light blue lines, visible only during the design of reports. Grid can help you put report objects more accurate, especially if you enable the option “Snap to grid” in the “View” tab of the report toolbar.

You can define the size of grid cells using button “Size…” in the “View” tab of the report toolbar.

Report layout is separated on few regions by horizontal grey Titles. These regions have different behavior when report is generated. You can place controls and fields into different regions to get expected results in generated report. You can read details about each region and its features here.

Tabs at the bottom of the layout area represent the report parts, one tab for each part.

Report consisting of a few report parts is called the multipart report.

A new report part can be added using the “+” button at the right of the tab bar or using its **Add Part…“ context menu item.

Report part tab has a context menu with the following actions:

• Rename…
• Delete…

On the right side of Report Editor you can see Property Inspector, which displays the list of properties of a selected object, or the common set of properties if few objects are selected. You can read a detailed description about properties of the controls and regions here.