Tutorial 13

This tutorial assumes you have the knowledge gained from working with the previous tutorials. After this tutorial you will have the ability to invoke the internal report designer and add a ‘chart’ to the chart section of the report.

Perform the following steps:

• If the Query Designer Tool is already running, please close it down. Invoke the NuVu Query Designer from the NuVu Query program group from the windows Start menu. The main NuVu Query Designer window will be displayed, and a welcome dialog window will also be displayed that shows recently saved/opened queries. We are going to create a new query from the previous query (tutorial12), so double-click on the ‘tutorial12′ item that should be displayed inside the Welcome dialog window (if you have successfully performed the previous tutorial and saved it as specified in that tutorial with a name of ‘tutorial12′). The original query will open inside the Designer. We need to now save this as ‘tutorial13′ before we start working with the query, so click on the File->Save As menu item and advise a new Query name of tutorial13 when the save properties are displayed.Click the  button to save the query with the new advised name (tutorial13).
• Click the  button to start the execution (running) of the query. This will open ‘advise runtime parameters’ click ok
• Click the  (Report Designer) button on the toolbar to invoke the internal Report Writer for this query. The internal Report Writer is a banded report designer similar to other reporting products, that shows each defined section in its own band (for example, the Page Header has its own band, the Details section is shown in a separate band, and each total section is also shown in a separate band). The example shows the bands that have been manipulated in terms of their leading and trailing spaces, and rectangles beneath the totals section as performed in Tutorial 10 and Tutorial 11 and Tutorial 12:
• Preview the current design by clicking the  (preview) button on the extreme right of the toolbar menu to view the report as it would appear to the user in the current default format.Because there is now a second grid in this query, a dialog window will appear asking you if you wish to see the second grid details in the preview. To keep things simple, we are not going to show the second grid details, so untick the ‘show details from second grid’ as shown below:
• The PDF or NuVu previewer should now open with the report, as shown below:
• In order to add a chart into the ‘Chart’ section, click the  (chart) toolbar button. The ‘Chart’ section will expand to give you an opportunity to paste the new chart onto the canvas inside that section. Move the mouse to an appropriate position on the canvas of the ‘Chart’ section (this will be the top-left position at which the chart will be drawn) and then simply left-click the mouse button. The chart will be drawn on to the canvas.The chart can be moved anywhere inside the grid by positioning the mouse anywhere within the boundaries of the chart object and then holding down the left mouse button and dragging the mouse in any direction.An example of the displayed chart is shown below:

  

• The attributes of the chart can be changed by selecting the chart object (clicking anywhere inside the boundaries of the chart object) and then right-clicking the mouse button which will invoke the chart properties window, from which many attributes can be set. The changes made on the chart properties window are immediately reflected in the chart object itself, so it is easy to experiment with different settings until the desired result is achieved.Here is an example of the chart properties window:
• Once the desired results have been achieved, click the SAVE button to save the changes to the chart object and close this window.
• Preview the current design by clicking the  (preview) button on the extreme right of the toolbar menu to view the report as it would appear to the user in the current default format.Because there is now a second grid in this query, a dialog window will appear asking you if you wish to see the second grid details in the preview. To keep things simple, we are not going to show the second grid details, so untick the ‘show details from second grid’ as shown below:
• The PDF or NuVu previewer should now open with the report, as shown below:
• We are now finished with the tutorial but need to save the changes that have been made to the report designer, so click the  (close) button at the top right hand corner of the designer window to close down the designer screen. If any changes have been made, then you will be asked if you wish to save these changes (in memory) or discard them. In this case we would like to save the changes so choose that option.
• Finally we will save the changes made to this query including the changes made to the internal report writer (as this will form the base query for the next tutorial), so simply click the  button and close down the query tool.

We are complete with the tutorial. An exported query containing this tutorial is available by right-clicking here and choosing Save Link As (Firefox) or Save Target As (Internet Explorer) to save the query import format file to a file on your hard disk, and then importing that query into the query tool (hint: choose File->Import Query from the main menu of the Query Designer).

End of Tutorial