Working with Report/Presentation Designer

The Report/Presentation Designer is used to create a layout of document templates of the Report type (or simply reports – see Adding/Editing Document Templates) and presentations of business objects and business object groups (see Defining Presentations). When the Report/Presentation designer is started for a new report or presentation the screen looks like this:

The working area consists of the Design Area (shown as the white rectangle) and the Report Designer toolbar. There are also optional horizontal and vertical rulers. Aware IM also displays a special window (not shown on the picture above) that represents the “Outline view” of the report design, i.e. all elements that the report contains are listed in this window as textual entries.

The Design Area is broken into several sections or bands (they are shown as grey titled bars running across the Design Area). Each band has a special meaning and is processed in its own manner when the report or presentation is filled out with data at run time. Bands are explained in more detail in Report/Presentation Bands. The report or presentation is created by adding report/presentation elements to the appropriate bands in the Design Area – see |Adding Report/Presentation Elements.

Reports or presentations are filled out with data at run time when the documents are generated from document templates (see Document Generation). For reports the source of data is determined when a report is configured and for presentations the source of data is the instance(s) of the business object that owns the presentation. The resulting documents are in the Adobe PDF format for reports and in the HTML format for presentations. Because of the differences between the PDF and HTML formats handling of reports and presentations is slightly different. The differences are summarized below:

1. While it is entirely possible and sometimes desirable to overlap different elements in reports, it is not recommended to overlap elements in presentations – if you do only one of the overlapping elements will be shown.
2. The PDF format only uses a handful of default fonts – if you want to use a different font it has to be imported as a custom font (see Adding Custom Font). Presentations on the other hand being HTML pages will ultimately refer to the font available on the end user’s machine; therefore you have to make sure that the end user’s machine has the font that you use in a presentation.
3. The Baseline vertical alignment is available for text, tag and image elements in presentations but not in reports. This alignment corresponds to the baseline alignment in HTML. In order to use the baseline alignment effectively in presentations the sizes of rectangles of the elements to be aligned must be identical.

It is worth repeating the first difference as a caution because it may severely impact how a presentation design is created:

See also: