Report inheritance

Often a group of reports share some common data - for example, the header/footer with company logo or other data, like email or address etc. Should the situation arise that some of this company data needs changing, for example the email address, then it would have to be done in each report! To avoid this tedious task, report inheritance can be used. What is report inheritance?

As an example, reports commonly have elements (logo, company name, email etc) typically placed in the report title and/or page header. A base report can be designed that contains only these common elements. All other reports can then use the base report and thus contain all of the common elements, as well as other elements specifically added to each report.

Should something (e.g. logo or email) need changing then the base report would be opened and the necessary changes made there. All reports inheriting from the base report would then be amended automatically. In fact, when a report based on inheritance is opened the base report is opened first of all, followed by the derived one.