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A window with report parameters is available from the “Report|Options...” menu. A dialogue has three pages.
In the first page you can see the general settings of the report:
You can tie a report to one of the printers installed in the system. This means that report printing will be performed by the selected printer by default. This might be useful in case when there are several different printers in the system; e.g. text documents can be tied with monochrome printer, while documents with graphics - to the color one. There is the “Default printer” item in the list of printers. When this item is selected, the report will not be tied with any printer, and therefore printing will be performed by a printer, which is set as the default one.
You can also set number of report copies to be printed and specify, whether it is necessary to perform collation. The values, which a user sets in this dialogue, would be displayed in the “Print” window.
If the “Double pass” flag is selected, report’s formation will be performed in two steps. During the first pass, a report is formed, and is divided into pages, but the result is not saved anywhere. In the second pass a standard report formation with saving a result in the stream is performed.
Why two passes are necessary? Most often, this option is used in cases when in a report there is a need for the total number of pages in it, i.e. the information of the “Page 1 of 15” type. The total number of pages is calculated during the first pass and is available via the “TOTALPAGES” system variable. The most frequent mistake is an attempt to use this variable in a single-pass report; in this case it returns “0.”
Another use is to perform any calculations in the first pass and display the results in the second pass. For example, when it is required to display a sum in the group header, which usually is calculated and displayed in the group footer. Calculations of this type are accomplished by writing report script code in the OnBeforePrint event of an object.
The “Print if empty” flag allows construction of a report, which contains no data lines. If this option is disabled, blank reports would not be constructed.
The “Password” field enables setting of a password which must be entered before opening a report.
On the second page you can setup the report inheritance options:
You can learn about inheritance later in the "Report inheritance" chapter. In this dialog you can see the base report's name (if report is inherited), detach the base report (in this case your report will be standalone, non-inherited) and inherit the report from one of base reports.
Controls in the third page of the dialogue allows you to set report’s description properties..
All fields in this dialog are for information purposes only. |
