About Report type form regions

One specialized aspect of the report-template type of form is that it is comprised entirely of FlexLayout components and regions. This gives you a great deal of flexibility when designing and laying out your report-template form.

At the most basic level, the entire report-template form is contained within two FlexLayout components, by default named NavigationFlexLayout and MainFlexLayout.

The NavigationFlexLayout component

The NavigationFlexLayout component hosts the various buttons used during runtime, when you are designing, developing, and testing the report-template. This part of the form does not print or publish when you actually generate and publish the report.

The buttons, which are created by default as part of the report-template form creation, include these:

• Run - This button allows you to actually run the report in a kind of "preview" mode. When you click this button, the system displays the report exactly as it will appear in the published output.
• Design - This button allows you to view the basic template design on which the report output is built. This is useful especially when you are designing the report, as it shows you how each region in the report is designed to display.
• Previous - When active, this button displays the page of the report that comes before the currently displayed page.
• Next - When active, this button displays the page of the report that comes after the currently displayed page.
• Export - This button actually publishes the report to a PDF file, after prompting you for the location to which it should be created.
  Note: Although you can use this button to manually publish the file, it publishes all information exactly as presented in the preview. You cannot select what options, ranges, etc., to include. For this reason, it is generally more useful to use a report criteria form, even for manual publication of the report.

The MainFlexLayout component

The MainFlexLayout component contains regions for all the content that is actually published when the report is generated. This component contains these basic regions that are used to control the way the report information displays:

• Report regions - These include the Report Header and Report Footer regions. The Report Header region typically displays on just the first page of the report, before any records are processed. It is typically used to show what options were selected/used when generating the report.
• Page regions - These include the Page Header and Page Footer regions. These regions display on each page and are configured on a page-by-page basis. Examples of information presented in these regions includes page numbers, site information, user information, company logo, report title, and so on.
• Group regions - These include the Group Header and Group Footer regions. These are included only if you selected at least one group property in the New Form Wizard. They are used to order and group together data according to the properties they are grouped by.
• Detail regions - These include the Detail Header, Detail, and Detail Footer regions. These regions are generated repeatedly. The Detail Header displays before the first row in the Detail collection. Then the Detail subregion displays once for each row in the collection. Finally, the Detail Footer displays once after the last Detail row in the collection.

Each of these regions can itself be a container for whatever additional components are required to display the information on the report as desired.

All of these basic regions must specify a character-based length (height). The heights of these subregions must be a fixed value, as opposed to a flexible value, so that the system can accurately determine which regions can fit on each page as the report is generated.