Setting up sub-reports

FlexLayout regions in sub-reports can be customized depending on the report designer requirements.

Note: The properties that are used to set up sub-reports are honored by the parent report.

Adding a sub-report to a parent report

Sub-reports are added to parent reports through report type region properties. All report forms contain a MainFlexLayout component. This component contains one or more report type regions. Each region in the main flex layout have sub-report related properties that include Sub-report Form and Sub-report Parameters. Specify the name of the sub-report that replaces the report type region in the parent by setting the Sub-report Form property to the appropriate name of the sub-report. Likewise, you may set the Sub-report Parameters property to pass runtime parameters from the parent report to the sub-report.

Report type regions in sub-reports can be customized by report designers. The report type region properties that are defined in sub-reports is applied to the parent reports and is honored in the formatting of the final report output. Some of the report type region properties that may influence the final report output include Insert Page Break Before or Insert Page Break After, Reset Page Number, Can Grow, VisibleWhen, and so on.

Setting page breaks

Use the Insert Page Break Before property and Insert Page Break After property to add page breaks at the beginning and at the end of any sub-report region.

You can set page breaks before the first region and after the last region of a sub-report to display the sub-report content on an individual page in the final report output. It is also possible to achieve a similar layout by inserting page breaks before and after the sub-report region in the parent report.

Renumbering pages

Use the Reset Page Number property on any report type region in a sub-report. This property is applied to the parent report and starts a new page numbering sequence in the final report output.

Note: This is a region property. If a region that includes a page break is non-visible, based on the VisibleWhen property, then the page break assigned to that region is also non-visible. Therefore, the page break is not applied to the parent report and does not affect the final report output. This feature can be used as an advantage when you want to control the existence of page breaks based on some varying values or the (non-)existence of data.

Displaying or hiding blank pages

Use the VisibleWhen property to determine if any report type region is (non-)visible based on some varying values or the (non-)existence of data.

Note: It is possible to hide a blank sub-report by setting the VisibleWhen property on each region to test for the non-existence of data. If all regions of a sub-report are non-visible, then the cumulative sub-report is also non-visible.

Allowing sub-reports to grow

Use the Can Grow property on any report type regions in sub-reports. This property allows the height of the region to expand as the components within the region also expand.

When the property is used in a sub-report, the value of the property is applied to the parent report and ultimately influence the final output of the report.

Understanding sub-report error messages inserted into parent reports

Sub-report related error messages may appear inserted into parent reports if the executing user does not have permission to view the sub-report or the system is not licensed appropriately to display the sub-report. The non-existence of a reference sub-report also inserts an error message into the parent report. In each case, resolving the specified issue also removes the error message that is inserted into the parent report. The inserted error messages are visible on a user-by-user basis and one user does not see the error message that is generated by another user.