VA Smalltalk Reports concepts
When you create a reporting application, you need to consider several design options that affect how you create, reuse, and test your reports.
Creating report parts
There are two ways to add reports to an applications:
• In the visual part for your application, you can drop a Report Shell part onto the Composition Editor next to your window part. If you construct a report this way, you can make direct connections between your report part and the other visual and nonvisual parts in your application.
• Create a separate, reusable report primary part. This way of creating reports gives you greater flexibility in changing and reusing reports. If you construct a report this way, then you also need to provide a way of passing information from your visual part to your report part. In general, you do this using variables as follows:
o Create separate visual and report parts in your application.
o For each object that you want to report on, add a variable to the report part and promote the variable as an attribute in the report part's public interface.
o In the visual part, use the Options ==> Add Part menu option on the Composition Editor to add the report part to your visual part.
o Connect the objects in your visual part to the attribute that represents the object in the report part.
In the sample application that you will construct in this book, you will see two examples of passing information between a visual part and a report part:
• Passing a value from the visual part to be used as a host variable in a database query in the report part
• Passing an ordered collection created in a visual part into a report part
Testing report parts
If a report requires that information be passed to it from another part, you need to be careful about how you test it. You need to either test it from the visual part, so that you can pass the information to the report from the user interface, or create an initialization method in the report part with sample data to be passed to the report.
When you open a Composition Editor on a report part, you will see that it has a test button much like the test button for visual parts. If you write an initialization method for your report, then the information in it gets passed to the report when you test it.
The sample application in this book leads you through two ways to test your report: from the application's user interface and from the Composition Editor open on the report part. You can also test a report by selecting the class name from the Parts list in the Organizer and then selecting the test button.
If you create a report that does not require information to be passed to it from another part, you can test it simply by selecting the test button on the report part's Composition Editor.
Using quick reports
The VA Smalltalk Reports feature supports two different types of quick reports:
• A quick report iterator for generating report fields for each item in an iterable object. This type of quick report enables you to report on each row from a database result table, for example, or each item in a collection.
• A quick report form for reporting on a single item from an iterable object. This type of quick report enables you to report on the current row in a database result table, for example, or the current item in a collection.
The quick report function automatically generates the type of quick report you need according to the object you request a quick report for:
• To generate a quick report iterator for all rows in a database result table, for example, you select the Quick Report option from the query part's pop-up menu, and then select the resultTable attribute.
• To generate a quick report form for the current row of a result table, you tear off the resultTable attribute, select the Quick Report option from the resultTable part's pop-up menu, and then select the currentRow attribute.
The sample application that you can build by following along this book shows how to generate both types of quick reports. It explains how to generate a quick report form for the current row of a database result table and how to generate a quick report iterator for every item in an ordered collection.
Last modified date: 01/29/2015