Rave Reports Developer Reference

Components

A component is defined as something placed on the page, such as a barcode, line, region, shape, etc. The components available in Rave can be found on any of the component toolbars (e.g. Standard, Drawing, Report and Barcode).

The toolbars are made available by clicking on the Tools menu followed by the Toolbars menu. The available toolbars will then be shown in another submenu and will have check marks showing the toolbars that are currently visible. Once a component toolbar is active and selected, a component can be selected and placed on the page. The Page is a special base component, and more details are given in the Page Designer chapter.

Special properties are associated with each component. These component properties can be seen using the Property Panel. Set the properties of each component to the desired setting by either typing the setting in a text dialog, using a drop down menu, or by using the special ellipse (…) button to get to the property dialog box.

There are many properties associated with each component, but don't be intimidated by the number of properties. The properties are there to allow adjustment for a component's behavior and in many cases the default settings are adequate. Also, please note that the number of properties listed with each component may vary depending on the user level that has been set under preferences. To adjust the user's level, please visit the environment tab in the preferences dialog. See the Preferences chapter for more details.

Since there are many properties associated with each component, this chapter will focus mainly on the component toolbars rather than their associated properties. Property details are listed in Appendix D. The current chapter provides a good overview of what each component toolbar does without too much detail about the property specifics. Do note that many components share common properties, so once the common properties are learned for one component, they can be applied to other properties.

Components are also defined by their relationship relative to other components. This relationship is defined by a parent-child relationship.  When a text component is placed on the page, the parent is the page component and the child is the text component. Another way to look at it is that the page contains the text component, thus the parent component contains the child component.

The parent-child relationship also extends into the positioning of the components. All positions are relative to the upper left corner of the parent, thus the Left property and Top property are used to define the relative position of a component. If the parent is like a Section component, which can contain any number of other components; then as the parent component is moved around, it's children components will move accordingly. If the parent component is deleted, all of its children will also be deleted.