Reports built using DataSight 's Report Designer follow a conventional banded report design advocated by Microsoft® and adopted by many other report engines. As opposed to "What you see is what you get" WYSIWYG reports in which a designed report is no different from how it would look on paper, banded reports provide a generalised notion of a report layout that is different from how a published document looks in Print Preview.
In the Report Designer, the report bands are sections of varied type and purpose, where report controls are contained. Bands are featured in the Designer Tab, solely to represent different sections of a report document (such as detail, report or page header, or footer). They allow you to select exactly where a control should be printed, and how many times.
This section describes the available report bands, explains their use, and illustrates how to add new bands to a report. Please refer to the following:
See also:
Main Report Bands
Basically, a report layout consists of various bands that contain report controls and define their location on document pages. When you start with creating a blank report, it contains only the essential bands by default (the detail band for displaying recurring contents that comes from a report's data source, along with the areas reserved for the top and bottom page margins).
The simplest examples of bands are page margins (repeated once on every document page) along with various headers and footers (repeated once for each page, group or an entire document).
The detail band differs both in its purpose (displaying recurring contents that comes from a report's data source) and behaviour (it is printed as many times, as there are records available in a data source unless you have filtered the incoming data). Every report must have a detail band and you cannot delete it.
|
Note |
Only the detail and group bands are used for displaying dynamic data source contents. Other headers and footers are commonly used to display various titles, summaries and customary information. |
Creating Sub-Reports
The Detail report band enables you to create hierarchical master-detail reports that provide detail information about each record displayed in the master report's detail band. You can create such reports when master-detail relationships are defined between data source tables:
In essence, a detail report band is a separate report (subreport) with its own data source, detail and other bands. A report can have any number of detail reports that can also be nested one into another.
|
Note |
You can display hierarchical information in a report in two different ways: · by creating groups · by using subreports See Providing Data to Reports to learn how to choose the approach that best suits your data hierarchy. |
Creating Band Copies
You can create functional copies of any band by adding sub-bands to it. This may be useful, for example, when you need a band to display different contents based on a specific condition.
See also Laying out Dynamic Report Contents to learn how you can control the location of bands' content on document pages.