Add A Text Header for the Page

With an idea of what we want to accomplish, as well as the data to do it, we can start designing. To start we'll give our report a header with a title. We use Text shapes anywhere we need to add text to the page. Activate the Text Shape and click-drag near the top of the page to create a field for text. Go ahead and give your report a title by typing into the field of the shape. You'll notice the text field in the lower left corner of the Designer, along with some buttons that let you customize the look and layout of the text. This configuration area will change depending on the selected component on the report. In the same area, you'll notice there is a tab titled "Properties" behind the Text Area's custom editor. This table provides access to a component's various properties. Feel free to experiment with the settings in the editor or property table to customize your title.

In addition to a title, providing some meta-data about the report can provide context or make it more readable. For instance, adding the date the report was generated is a very common task. However, we don't want to type the date into the text field, because all reports we run (could be today, tomorrow or next year!) will show what we type. Instead, we want the date to reflect the day the report was generated. If you look at your key browser, you'll see a folder called "Built In". This folder provides a number keys that are common in reports. Go ahead and grab the "Date" key and drop it in the same text field as your title.

You'll notice that the key you dropped into the text field is surrounded by '@' symbols. The @ symbols tell the report engine that text inside (in this case Date) is a key, and it should try and find value when the report is generated. If you click over to the Preview tab, you should see today's date where @Date@ is. In addition, you'll see that the text is in the same place it was in the designer. As our report gets more complex, we'll want to think about the layout of the items on the page to accomplish the look we want.

Adding text on a page shared with a repeating component (such as a table) will add the text to all pages created by the component. In some cases, like page numbers, this is desirable. In others, you may only want a single header for your table. Tables themselves have headers, which we'll briefly talk about, but you can read about them in more depth in the Reporting Table documentation.

Adding a Table

Grab a Table component off the palette and add it to the page. With the Table selected, look in the bottom left corner under the Key Browser, and you will see the configuration panel for the Table. We want the Table to show us data about our Widgets Factories, so go ahead and grab the parent Data Key from the browser, and drag it to the Data Key field of the Table Config Panel. You'll notice that the Data Key field updates, as does the Table itself. Our WidgetProduction data key is now providing data for the table, so lets set up our table.

We want a header and summary, so check those boxes and lay out your table however you like. To calculate the efficiency in terms of Units per Minute of runtime, we use the keychain expression @Produced/Minutes@. Here is what we came up with, and the generated report.

To finish the report, we just need to add a chart, we can just resize the table a little bit and add our chart right under the page header. Drag the bar chart into the space above our table, size it and the table to suite. Add the Data Key, for our data and take a look at the preview. Instantly, you'll notice the bar chart adds a bar for each column in the data, where our goal is to only show the number of widgets produced.

Edit Data Sources to Accommodate Requirements

If we were using Query data sources, we'd create an additional source use a nested source to get the two rows we want. For this example, we'll go ahead and create an additional data source using another static CSV source that includes only the columns we are interested in.

Now when we generate our report with the new data, we get a chart with the items produced, and a table summary of the different locations.

Final Product

We configured our bar chart to use the new data source, and got a result that seems to meet our goals.

Adding a Schedule

Adding a schedule is as easy as clicking on the button of the Report Schedule panel in our workspace.

With the schedule added, use the dropdown options to determine when it should run. We set ours to run on the 5th weekday (Friday) at 23:59, or one minute before midnight. Keep in mind, this report will execute on our Gateway, so the schedule will be according to Gateway Local Time. We didn't use parameters in this report, so we can click over to the Actions tab to set up the actions for this Schedule. Here we will click the next to the empty Action list, and select Save File. That presents us with Folder Path and FileName configuration space. We change the path from default to something that works for our system. Once happy with the settings, you can test run clicking the .

Congratulations! You've completed your first report!