Report settings

A window with report parameters is available from the "Report|Options..." menu. A dialogue has two pages:

You can tie a report with one of the printers installed in the system. This means that report printing will be performed by the selected printer by default. This might be useful in case when there are several different printers in the system; e.g.text documents can be tied with monochrome printer, while documents with graphic - with the color one. There is the "Default printer" item in the list of printers. When this item is selected, the report will not be tied with an printer, and therefore printing will be performed by a printer, hich is set as the default one.

You can also set number of report copies to be printed and specify, whether it is necessary to perform collation. The values, which a user sets in this dialogue, would be displayed in the "Print" window.

If the "Double pass" flag is selected, report’s formation will be performed in two steps. During the first pass, a report is formed, and is divided into pages, but the result is not saved an where. In the second pass a standard report formation with saving a result in the stream is performed.

Why two passes are necessary? Most often, this option is used in cases when in a report there is mentioning about the total number of pages in it, i.e.the information of the "Page 1 of 15" type. The total number of pages is calculated during the first pass and is available via the "TOTALPAGES" system variable. The most frequent mistake is an attempt to use this variable in a single-pass report;in this case it returns "0."

Another field of application is performing an calculations in the first pass and displaying of results in the second pass. It might be convenient, for example, in case when it is required to display a sum in the group header, which usually is calculated and displayed in the group footer. Calculations of such kind are connected with usage of the FR embedded language.

The "Print if empty" flag allows to construct a report, which contains no data lines. If this option is disabled, blank reports would not be constructed.

The "Password" field enables to set a password which will be inquired on opening a report.

Controls in the second page of the dialogue enable to set report’s description.