Rave Reports Visual Designer

Component Tabs

There are four component toolbars selectable from the main menu tabs.

They are the "Bar Code", "Drawing", "Report" and "Standard" components tabs. When you click on one of these tabs, it will open the toolbar for that particular set of components. A component is an item that is dropped on the page layout. Most of these will be visible at that point and can be moved or modified to achieved to the report layout that you want. A few of these components (like "DataCycle", "Font Master" and many Calc items) are not visible but are place on the page. These non-visible components can be seen in the treeview panel.

Each of the components are described in more detail in the links below, but a common features to all of them will be the property panel. The properties of each component is where you would set the features for that particular component to what you desire. For example, line width and line color are two of the many properties for a line. Don't let the number of properties bother you. They are there to let you adjust that component and in many cases the default setting is adequate. There are a couple of properties that apply to all components, so we will discuss them here.

The "Name" property is used to assign a new name to that control or to find out what the name of the control is. By default, RAVE assigns sequential names based on the type of the component, such as 'Section1', 'Section2', and so on. You can change these (and are encouraged to do so) to more meaningful names that make both the Project Tree & code more readable. The "Name" property must not contain any spaces or special characters. This is the name that will be used in the Project Tree Panel.

Another common property is the "Mirror" property. The ability to mirror or duplicate a section, component etc is a very powerful feature of RAVE. It simple terms mirroring allows you to have a master form, letter, design. Items that are mirrored can not be changed, but more can be added. So if you had a letterhead with company logo saved, then you could mirror that design and then add the additional components for the desired output.

See Also:

BarCode, Drawing, Report, Standard, Toolbars