Rave Reports Visual Designer

Report Preview

Although the Preview is primarily used for previewing a report, the Preview option has many more capabilities than what is intuitively understood from its name. Begin by executing a report. When the Output Options dialog appears, the Preview radio button can be selected. Clicking OK will continue with the Preview process.

The Preview screen is used to see the output of the designed report. The actual appearance on the screen resembles that of the printed report. The screen is based on a page-by-page output. There is a toolbar at the top of the Preview screen that allows navigation as well as other functions, which are explained in the following paragraphs.

Most of the functions permitted in the Preview screen can either be performed using the toolbar or through the Preview menu options. We will go through and explain the menu options in the rest of this section.

The first group of icons (separated by a vertical line on the toolbar), can be found in the File menu. They are used for opening, saving, printing, and exiting the Preview of a report.

Although the Preview screen displays the current report in the designer, it can also be used to load a previously saved report (with an NDR extension). This can be done by clicking on Open in the File menu. A dialog box appears prompting for the desired report file. When the NDR file is opened, the report that was previously in the Preview is discarded. This does not mean that the report can not be  regenerated. To get the previous report, simply re-execute the report and choose Preview. Only the report that was Previewed upon execution can be regenerated. Other reports can only be revisited if they were previously saved or if their projects are re-opened and re-executed.

The Save As is used to save the report in the Preview. Click on Save As and the Save File dialog appears. Use this dialog to save the current report to various formats, including PDF and HTML (these two formats are covered later in this section). Another format that a report can be saved to is the NDR report type, again this is a Rave snapshot of the report. Although reports can be printed directly by choosing Execute and then Printer, the Preview screen also provides this option, since many times it is necessary to check the preview of the report before actually printing it.

The remaining functions directly affect the viewing of the report on the Preview screen. The second section on the toolbar and the items in the Page menu are used for navigation between pages. The buttons used to designate the options will look familiar to database users, since they follow the same convention. The first button is used to move to the first page of the report. The second button moves to the previous page. The third button is used to move to the next page, and the last button can be used to move to the end of the report. On the toolbar, there is a page indicator, which at all times reflects the current page and the number of total pages. This page indicator can also be used to go to a page directly by typing the page in the edit box. Or use the Go to Page in the Page menu.  For example, entering 10 in the edit box will display the 10th page of the report (providing there are 10 or more pages available).

Zooming is also available in Preview. The magnifying glass containing a plus sign will zoom in on the page, while the magnifying glass with a minus sign will zoom out. Similar to the page edit box, there is a zoom box that is used both for displaying the actual zoom and allowing the user to enter a specific percentage value. Just type in a number and the Preview will be zoomed in or out to that zoom percentage.

There are also two preset zoom values for fast navigation. The first one is the Fit to Page Width option. By clicking on this, the report can be adjusted so that the width of the page takes up the entire region of the preview screen. The second preset is Fit to Page. It can be used to view the entire page on the screen. The side effect of this is that although the report can be viewed as a whole, the actual contents might be difficult to read. Normally this can be used to get a general overview of the report layout.

The preview window can be exited by either clicking on the Door icon located on the far right of the toolbar or by clicking on the "X" button on the window (like any other window).