Reports Information


VisualAge Reports concepts

When you create a reporting application, you need to consider several design options that affect how you create, reuse, and test your reports.

Creating report parts

There are two ways to add reports to an applications:

In the sample application that you will construct in this book, you will see two examples of passing information between a visual part and a report part:

Testing report parts

If a report requires that information be passed to it from another part, you need to be careful about how you test it. You need to either test it from the visual part, so that you can pass the information to the report from the user interface, or create an initialization method in the report part with sample data to be passed to the report.

When you open a Composition Editor on a report part, you will see that it has a test button much like the test button for visual parts. If you write an initialization method for your report, then the information in it gets passed to the report when you test it.

The sample application in this book leads you through two ways to test your report: from the application's user interface and from the Composition Editor open on the report part. You can also test a report by selecting the class name from the Parts list in the VisualAge Organizer and then selecting the test button.

If you create a report that does not require information to be passed to it from another part, you can test it simply by selecting the test button on the report part's Composition Editor.

Using quick reports

The VisualAge Reports feature supports two different types of quick reports:

The quick report function automatically generates the type of quick report you need according to the object you request a quick report for:

The sample application that you can build by following along this book shows how to generate both types of quick reports. It explains how to generate a quick report form for the current row of a database result table and how to generate a quick report iterator for every item in an ordered collection.


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