Creating Your First Report

See also:

Getting Started

Once you have successfully installed the HTML Reports Module, you can proceed to start creating report templates.

In this section we will create a simple Hello World report. All it will do is print out "Hello World" once for each record in the found set. It won't use any dynamic, we will cover that in the next section: Adding Dynamic Fields.

Follow these steps to begin:

1. Log in to your Xataface application as an administrator (i.e. a user with ALL() permissions granted to them.
2. Click the "Control Panel" link in the upper right to access the application control panel.
   
3. Click "Manage Reports". This will take you to the list view for the reports table. At first this will be empty.
4. Click "New Record". This will bring up the new record form for a report.
   
5. In the Tablename dropdown list, select any table that you want to run the report on.
6. In the Template HTML field, enter "Hello World"
7. Click the Preview Report button on the editor toolbar (one of the lower right buttons).
   
   You'll see "Hello World" just printed out 10 times, one after another (if the table you selected in the Tablename dropdown has at least 10 records in it). This is because the preview function just shows you the result of the report when run on the first 10 records in the table.
   
   .

This section provided a simple example with a very static and boring template. We haven't even saved our template yet - all we have done is previewed it. This is because there are a few key items that we need to specify before we save our template (e.g. the report name and label). We'll go over these options later in the publishing section, but first we're going to have some more fun just working with the preview function to see samples of our results.

Next: Adding Dynamic Fields to Our Template

See also:

Getting Started