Introduction to Rave Reports - Part III: Data Aware Reports

In the previous articles, I have shown how do the Code Based engine and the Visual Designer work. In this document, I'm going to explore the Data-Aware capabilities of Rave Reports.

The Database Connection

There are two ways to access data from inside a report: you can share the same connection established by your application, fetching records from Datasets that exists in your Forms or Datamodules, or you can configure a new connection on the report, allowing it to be independent of a particular application. For the first method you would use a Direct Data View, and a Driver Data View for the second. Data View is the analog of a DataSource/DataSet combination inside the report.

If you intend to deploy your application using Nevrona's Rave Report Server, you should use Driver Data Views.

The Driver Data View

Let's create a simple database report using a Driver Data View. Start the Rave Visual Designer, and start a new project. We need to define the database connection. To do this, choose File/New Database Object, or press the sixth button in the toolbar (the purple cube). The Data Connections window will appear:

Choose Database Connection, and you will be asked which Data Link you are going to be using. There is a folder called DataLinks where Rave has been installed, containing some files with the .rvd extensions, responsible from the connection mechanism. By default, you can choose between BDE, DbExpress and ADO. I'll be using BDE for this example. Choose BDE, press Finish, and the Database Connection Parameters window will show up. Every Data Link has a different set of connection parameters available, similar to those available in the Delphi IDE. For now, just set Alias to DbDemos and press OK. Notice that a Database object has been added to the Project Treeview, under Data View Dictionary:

Notice that the settings you configured in the Database Connection Parameters, after the wizard, including username and password, if aplicable, were saved in the AuthDesign property of the Database component. In the AuthRun property you can use different settings to be used at runtime, when your report has been deployed.

We are going to create now the Driver Data View. Click on New Data Object, then choose Driver Data View. You should now choose the Database Connection that is going to be used by this Data View: choose the Database created in the previous step. A Query Avanced Designer will show up. Drag and Drop the table customer.db from the table list to the Layout window. It should look like this:

If you have more than one table, you should drag and drop fields that should be joined between tables. If you press the Editor button you can check the generated SQL, or type-in a more complex query. Let's keep the simple Customer Listing for now. Press OK and a DriverDataView will be added to the Project Treeview, below the Database components, having the selected fields as subitems:

Notice that I renamed the Database Connection and the Data Viewto more appropriate names. It's in the Treeview where properties of the fields should be set, like the Display Label (FullName property), and the DisplayFormat.

Regions and Bands

Report components that should be printed in a fixed position in every page, like fixed headers and footers can be put directly in page. Components whose position will be dependent of previously printed items, should be put in bands. DataBands will be printed once for every record in the linked DataView, while regular Bands will only be printed once, regardless of how many records have been selected. Both can contain Data-Aware components (like DataText), or regular components (like Text).

Bands should be put inside Regions. Regions delimitate the width of the bands, and the maximum height that bands can use before starting a new page. One page can have many Regions, and one Region can contain many Bands.

Add a Region to the Page covering its whole area. Inside the region add a Band, to be used as the report header, a DataBand, to print the customer information, and another Band, the report footer.

If you wish to change the ordering of existing bands in a report, use the Move Forward and Move Behind buttons in the Aligment Toolbar.

Rename the bands to more meaningful names (I used Header, CustomerData and Footer). Set the DataView property of CustomerData to DvCustomer, and set CustomerData as the ControllerBand of the Header and Footer bands. You should also run the Band Style Editor, from the Object Inspector, and set the Print Location of those two bands to Body Header and Body Footer, respectively. You can have an idea on how the report is going to be printed observing the Band Display as you change the settings. It shows iterating bands repeated three times, and other bands only once:

We also want the Header to be printed in other pages in case the listing spans more than one page: check the New Page option in the Print Occurrence groupbox, in that same dialog.

The Footer band will only print when DvCustomers has reached its end. If you want it printed in every page, regardless of that, just put the components directly on the page, below the region, and not in a Band.

In the editor, you can quickly identify the relationship between bands, their styles and their print occurrences:

Adding Fields

It's not hard to add fields to a report. You can Ctrl+Drag the fields from the DataView, in the Project Treeview, to add DataText components to the report, and Alt+Drag them to add Text components containing the Fullname property. This allows you to quickly create the layout of the report. Now add some fields to CustomerData and their title to the Header. I added CustNo, Company, Phone, TaxRate and LastInvoiceDate.

Don't forget that you can use the tools on the Alignment Toolbar to align the components, even if they are in different bands.

I added a title to the Header band and a simple text to the Footer band, indicating that the listing has ended. Later on the series we are going to see how to use the CalcOp and CalcTotal components to be able to add totals, averages and other calculated values to the Footer.

Adding the Report to Your Project

To add this report to your project you should use use the same approach as seen in Part II: just use a RvProject in a Form or DataModule, link it to the report file, and call it's Execute method. But there is one gotcha when using Driver Data Views: your application must load the apropriate driver. To do that, just add the unit RvDLBDE to your uses clause, if using BDE, RvDLDBX if using DbExpress, or RvDLADO if using ADO.

Conclusions

This article has shown how to develop simple DataAware reports. You can find a project containing the report developed here on CodeCentral. Part IV will demonstrate the use of Direct Data View, show how to make Master/Detail reports, and how to calculate values to display totals and calculated fields.