Rave Reports Visual Designer

Lesson - Data Connections

Data Connections provide a bridge between the data in your application and a Rave report. The first thing you have to do is choose the type of Rave data connection that you will need. This is determined by the type of database components that you are using. Use the table below to help you decide the best data connection component to use:

The Name property of the data connection component is used as the name of the data connection itself. It is important to use unique names for your data connection components since there can be no duplication across your application. It is also good practice to include a unique application identifier in your data connection names since data connections are visible from other applications. For example, if your application is called Wizbang Object Wizard you could prepend the letters WOW in front of each data connection name to help insure your data connection names are unique for your application.

The Visible property of the data connection component is used to define whether the data connection is visible to other applications or the end-user version of the Rave visual designer. The default value of False means that the data connection will only be visible to a Rave report being printed from within the same application as the data connection component or from the programmer version of the Rave visual designer. A value of True for the Visible property means that the data connection will be visible to any Rave report being run from within any application or from the end-user or programmer version of the Rave visual designer. While data connections of this type are available to the end-user designer, they will not be displayed when then end-user attempts to create a new data view unless they belong to the application that started the Rave visual designer. If you want to make data connections from other applications available to your end-users it is best to create a report project with the programmer version of the Rave visual designer with the data views already defined for these external data connections.