Rave Reports Visual Designer

DataText - Editor

You have two options for entering data in a DataField property. You can either select a single field using the drop list option. This is fine for normal database reporting needs where you only want a single data field for each data text item. However, there are reporting requirements where you want to combine various fields together. Two common examples are City State and Zip Code or Firstname Lastname combinations. In code this would be accomplished using a statement like the following:

       City + ',_' + State + '__' + Zip                or                FirstName + "_" + LastName

NOTE: the underscore character represents a space.

The DataField property has a Data Text Editor which assists you in building complex composite fields. To do this you click on the ellipsis and open the Data Text Editor. This editor will give the power to concatenate fields, parameters, or variables together to build a very complex data aware text field simply by dropping the different list boxes and selecting the item you want. There is a lot of combinations in this editor, we will cover them quickly here, but try the different combinations your self and it should help the learning curve.

Note that the dialog box is divided into several groups, Data Fields, Report Variables, Project Parameters, Post Initialize Variables and Data Text. Data Text is the result window. So watch this window as you insert different items. The two buttons on the right side of this window are + or &. The "plus" sign will add the two items together with no spaces while the "&" will concatenate them with a single space. So your first step is decide on doing a + or &, then selecting the text from one of the three groups above the Data Text window.

If you want to add the field "OrderNo" to the "CustNo", then click once on the "+" sign, go up to the Data Fields group, drop the Data Field list box, select "OrderNo". Then click once on the "Insert Field" button and that will be added for you in the Data Text window. You could add more even more data fields. Notice the "Selected" item in the Data View group. If you have more than one data view active, then you could select another Data View, and then pick a field from that Data View. However, do not restrict yourself to thinking of combining only data fields. You can combine "Report Variables" or "Project Parameters". Go to the "Report Variables" group and drop the list box for variables and notice the ones that are already available.

Another item available to you is project parameters. This could be a "UserName", "ReportTitle" or "UserOption" parameter from the code based side of Rave. To create the list of "Project Parameters", select the "RaveProject" in the project tree panel (very top item). Down in the "Properties" panel will be a "Parameters" property. Click on the ellipsis and you will get a typical strings editor where you can enter the different parameters that you will pass to Rave from your application, like "UserName" etc.

CAUTION

Remember to use a "+" or "&" between each item that you are combining in the Data Text window. You can type in the Data Text window, so you can correct errors by highlighting, deleting or replacing erroneous entry's made in the data text stream.

See Also:

Anchor, Anchor Editor, Band Style Editor, Font Editor, Line Toolbar, Report Variables