Rave Reports Visual Designer

Batch and Chain Reporting

Once the Report Design is complete and working, the day-to-day routines get settled. At this point, it would not be unusual to find out there often is a need to print several Reports in some kind of sequence. This could be a group of Reports that are always generated at the end of each month, quarter, etc. Another example might be a series of executive summaries that are needed on a demand basis by upper level management. Of course, it is possible to run each required Report individually for these repetitive cases. Then when they are all done, group them together and give them to the requesting office. This often means that there is a checklist that details what repetitive Reports are required, when and for whom.

This problem of producing a repetitive sequence of Reports is solved with Rave by linking the Reports to each other. Rave has the ability to link the Report Page definitions in a wide variety of ways by setting different combinations of three properties; Page.GotoMode, Page.GotoPage and Report.PageList. It is important to note that the setting of the GotoMode property determines the behavior of the GotoPage property. The PageList property is at Report Node level and is designed to provide a way to initiate several different GotoPage property chains in a defined sequence.

Although we will give examples of how we envision achieving various Batch/Chain sequences of Pages, it will not be possible to include all of the possibilities. The secret is that one should understand and be flexible on how to “mix and match” the various parts of Rave. In particular, pay special attention to the Global Page catalog and the GotoMode, GotoPage, Mirror and PageList properties. Different combinations of these provide a wide range of output options. There is a lot of power here, so the best advice is to start with simple Reports. Then add some of these powerful extras and as they make sense.