This lesson is part of the Reporting in Ignition course. You can browse the rest of the lessons below.

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Let's take a look through the report workspace.

Video recorded using: Ignition 7.9

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[00:00] Ignition 7.8 features a new version of the reporting module. This new module offers similar functionality to the previous version, as well as a number of improvements and new features. First, reports run on the gateway now, and no longer rely on a client to be generated. Second, we've done away with the old Report Designer, and gave reports a new workspace. I'm in my designer here, and if we take a look in the Project Browser, let's scroll down, and you'll see that it's new Reports section. Let's create a new report, and take a look. First log in as My Report. You'll see these five panels at the top. This makes up the workflow of a report. So we'll start here in the Report Overview panel. First, you'll see the name of your report. You'll see the Last Scheduled Run and Next Scheduled Run. These are related to the Schedule panel that we'll get to in a moment. You can also type in a description of your report. And you'll also find a Report Snapshot. Also, you'll see this tab at the bottom. In the past you could only have one report open in the Report Designer at a time. However, it's possible to work on multiple reports in this new workspace. Next, we'll take a look at the Data panel. The Data panel is where you collect all of the data that will be used in your report. You'll see there are two parameters here, created by default. Every report created comes with a start date and an end date parameter. Parameters are similar to custom properties on vision components, and you can create any number of parameters, if you like. I'm just going to click on this Plus icon here. Click on New Parameter. And you'll see we have a new parameter, right here. We can give the new parameter a name. I'll just leave it as New Parameter for right now. We can select a different data type. And then we need to give it a default value. Additionally, we can create a new data source. Data Sources are similar to Queries that run in your report. We can add a Data Source by clicking on the Plus icon. And let's select a SQL Query. And now you see it'll appear down below. We also added some error checking here. If there's a problem with your data sources or your parameters, and you head over to one of the panels on the right, you'll see an error or a warning appear. "Looks like New Parameter needs a default value". And "the Query was empty". So we'll head back to the Data panel. We'll delete our Query. And we'll give our New Parameter a default value of one. Next, let's take a look at the Design panel. One of the goals with this new version of the reporting module was to make the experience of designing a report very similar to designing a vision window. First, you'll see the Property Inspector in the lower left-hand corner. This is very similar to the Property Editor, and will show you all the properties of the selected component. Above that is the Key Browser. This is where you'll find all your parameters and data sources. If we open Parameters, you'll see New Parameter, as well as Start Date and End Date. On the right, you'll see the Component palate. These Components are reporting-specific. Some of them are familiar from the previous version of the reporting module, such as the Table. Some of them are new, like this XY Chart. Similar to the vision module's Component palate, you can easily drag and drop components down onto your report. Next, we'll head over to the Preview panel. This allows you to very quickly take a look at a preview of your report. Now, mine's not very interesting, since I don't have any data in my chart, but you'll find it's very easy to click back and forth between the Design panel and the Preview panel. Also in the Preview panel, you'll see this xml data, over here. This is the raw data from my parameters and data sources. So, you can see, here's the value for End Date, the value for New Parameter, some built-in keys, and the value for Start Date. Last, we'll take a look at the Schedule panel. The Schedule panel allows you to print or email your report on a schedule. We'll come to the right-hand side of this table, here. We'll click on the Plus icon, to create a New Schedule. And you'll see down below, on the Schedule tab here, we can pick a certain time of day for this Schedule to run. So, right now it's Once Per Day. We can pick Every Other Day, instead. So then we can head over to the Parameters tab and we can override the default value of any of our parameters here. You'll see that all of my parameters are listed, including New Parameter down there at the bottom. Lastly, you'll see the Actions tab. The Actions tab is where you'll determine what you want to do with your report on your schedule. If you click on the Plus icon here, you'll see that we can print the report, we can save it to an FTP server, we can save it locally to the gateway, send out an email, or just run a script. The last thing I want to cover is the new Report Viewer component. If we head back to our window, I'll check the Component panel on the right-hand side. We'll go down to the Report Viewer. Now, this has a similar name, but it's actually different than the previous version of the Report Viewer. With the Report Viewer selected, we can come down here to the Property Editor, and we can set up this Report Path property to show any of our reports. Click on My Report, and there it is. Additionally, if we scroll down on the Property Editor, you'll see all the parameters available as properties. This way, you combine your Report Parameters to some other component on the window. Now, we did keep backwards compatibility in mind. If you update to 7.8, any of your legacy reports will work just fine. However, they will not be able to take advantage of any new features, such as scheduling. Now, it is possible to convert your legacy reports, but we'll talk about that in a later video.

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