Creating reports
You create VA Smalltalk reports by constructing them from visual parts in much the same way that you create an application and its user interface in VA Smalltalk. If you are familiar with the VA Smalltalk paradigm of construction from parts, then your experience in building VA Smalltalk views will carry over well to building reports.
The VA Smalltalk Reports feature provides a new reports category on your Composition Editor's parts palette. You build your report by selecting parts from this category, dropping them onto the Composition Editor free-form surface, and making connections between them. To provide values for the fields on your report, you make connections between data objects (such as database query result tables, business object models, streams, or collections) to the fields. VA Smalltalk data converters provide object-to-text formatting.
The VA Smalltalk Reports feature provides several tools for simplifying and automating common reporting functions:
•Many VA Smalltalk objects are enabled with a quick report feature for generating default reports on an object with just a few mouse clicks. Quick reports are similar to the quick form feature used in constructing a user interface.
•Special text parts are provided for adding date, time, title, and page number fields to your reports.
•You can include image fields for printing graphics in your reports from bitmap, icon, TIFF, and PCX files. Support for graphics in a report includes options for stretching, clipping, and aligning images in the field.
•Report iterators provide the capability to repeat a group of lines for a collection of objects such as the results of a query or a collection of business objects.
•Many report parts provide totals at the group, iterator, page, and report levels. But the reports are single-pass, so precalculated totals, such as a percentage of a total, will not be available. Complex calculated fields can be implemented as Smalltalk methods.
You can build your reports as separate reusable parts or you can place them next to your user-interface parts in the Composition Editor. Just as you can create reusable UI parts to be included in multiple views for your application, you can also create reusable report parts to be embedded in other reports.
Last modified date: 01/29/2015