You create VisualAge reports by constructing them from visual parts in much the same way that you create an application and its user interface in VisualAge. If you are familiar with the VisualAge paradigm of construction from parts, then your experience in building VisualAge views will carry over well to building reports.
The VisualAge Reports feature provides a new reports category on your Composition Editor's parts palette. You build your report by selecting parts from this category, dropping them onto the Composition Editor free-form surface, and making connections between them. To provide values for the fields on your report, you make connections between data objects (such as database query result tables, business object models, streams, or collections) to the fields. VisualAge data converters provide object-to-text formatting.
The VisualAge Reports feature provides several tools for simplifying and automating common reporting functions:
You can build your reports as separate reusable parts or you can place them next to your user-interface parts in the Composition Editor. Just as you can create reusable UI parts to be included in multiple views for your application, you can also create reusable report parts to be embedded in other reports.