Report designer elements (overview)
The Report designer provides a visual design surface where you can modify reports created with the Report wizard and build new reports from scratch.
The Report and Group panes
You can view the report in two panes:
The Report pane, where you visually design the report
The Group pane, which displays the hierarchy of the groups in the report.
When you first open the Report designer, the split bar between the panes appears at the far left edge of the Report designer window. To open the Group pane, drag the split bar to the right.
The Group pane shows the hierarchy of objects in the report.
The dotted-line frame labeled Pagetemplate1 is the report object that determines the appearance of the page, such as the background color. Here is where you would place a report title. A report may include more than one pageTemplate object, so that different pages can have different layouts.
When creating a report, you place data access components on the pageTemplate object.
The inner dotted-line frame with the vertical label Streamframe1 is a streamFrame object. This object displays rowset data that is streamed from linked tables (specified in its streamSource property). One or more streamFrame objects may be contained within the pageTemplate object. Whatever is placed in the streamFrame area of a report will be displayed when the report is printed.
If you’re using standard user interface components, place them on the streamFrame.
The Group1-Headerband displays the label of the grouped field. Groups are contained in a streamSource object and rendered in a streamFrame object.
The detailBands are the streamFrame objects that contain the rowsets streamed from the linked table. Each detailBand contains data from an individual row in the table.
The Report pane shows the report appearance with the corresponding structures shown in the Group pane marked.
The outer dotted area represents the margins of the actual report page (the pageTemplate object).
The inner dotted line represents the data rows of the report (the streamFrame object).
The individual fields of the row are columns in the report (the detailBand objects).