When speaking of "reporting" we mean the process that data which comes from a database or has been calculated is merged with the text and layout objects stored in a report template to create a new document. Already the basis version of TextDynamic has a powerful method to mix text and data, called mail merge. In contrast to this easy to use method the "reporting" we talk about here allows that areas of the report template can be looped for each row in the input data which is typically the result of a database query. Of course the looping allows recursion to work with relationally organized data.
Example of a customer organization application:
We need a database with two tables, one table contains the names and addresses of the customers of a company. Each customer has a unique number: "CUST_ID".
The second table contains all orders received by the sales department. To identify that a certain order was placed by a certain customer the (lookup-)field CUST_ID receives the value of the field CUST_ID found in the first table, the customer table.
In a real application we would need additional tables to group orders by dates, to store received payments, to cancel orders and so on. But we want to keep things simple, only show the basic concepts.
Creating the data input form for the two tables would be fairly simple, but the code which creates and prints the invoice can be tricky.
TextDynamic simplifies this problem for you by seperating the necessary tasks into several steps.
(a) Collect the required fields from the involved tables and add into virtual groups.
What is done here is basically the creation of a XML structure which represents the graphic above. In this step you also add group variables which are used to sum up values to create totals.
From the structure created in (a) TextDynamic can create a raw reporting template. You can now format this template, add or remove fields and text. You can also enable the end users to adjust the reporting template to their needs. An external application is not required for this, all is done with TextDynamic.
(b) Create the necessary programming logic to provide the data for the groups. Usually you will create SQL queries for the inner groups each time one row of the outer group is processed. (Although SQL allows the GROUPBY mode in the SELECT method, we recommend to execute multiple SQL statements for the inner groups. So you have more control over the ordering of the rows and deeper nesting levels are no problem)
To start simple we only create a list from items in table "Orders". This would be already sufficient to create an invoice for a certain customer.