Firbeck Logo

Designing reports

A report template describes the layout and content of the report. The Scrivo report template designer helps you to design your report templates, providing a view of all your data items with easy drag-and-drop to add data into the template:

  1. Drop a data item onto your template
  2. Adjust the item's format and properties
  3. Preview to see how your report will look

Template designer item properties

The template designer shows you all the properties of each report item, so you can control exactly how each item appears in your report. Here's a selection:

Template designer

Background colour
A fill colour for the background of the item, can be transparent
Horizontal and vertical alignment
Controls the positioning of the data within the item's bounds
Repeat marker and repeat data handling
Options for handling repeating data, including hiding the second and subsequent occurrences, or replacing them with a given marker
Outline and outline colour
Options for adding a border to the item
Table of contents level
Where to include this item in a table of contents. Learn more
Link column
Optionally identifies a column containing a hyperlink target, so this item can be a live jump
Scripts
Scripts for formatting or rendering this item. See Customisation for more details
Highlights
A collection of conditions on the data, with formatting options to highlight data that fulfills the condition. For example, you could highlight in red any values above 100, with values below 50 highlighted in green. Learn more

Groups of report items also have properties you can use to control the 'flow' of your report:

Template designer group properties

Keep together
Indicates that the group should never be split across pages
Orientation
Can switch the orientation between portrait and landscape before a group is rendered. This is useful for groups containing data that is naturally wide, or a group containing a table with many columns.
Page Break Before or After
Identifies where a page break might be forced, including when the group is within a certain threshold of the bottom of the page
Suppress when no data
Can be used to suppress the group entirely when all the data items are empty
Repeat limit
Controls the maximum number of repeats of the group the report will contain. This is useful for 'top 5' type reports.

Table of contents

Your report can include a table of contents with live jumps to the page on which each data value occurs:

Table of contents

Simply set the 'Table of contents level' property for each data item to control its inclusion in the table of contents.

Setting multiple levels gives a hierarchical table of contents as shown: Wales, Scotland and East are level 1, whereas each region is level 2.

Even specialized data and images can appear in the table of contents.

The table of contents can appear at the start of report, or you can choose to place it at the end as an 'index'.

Conditional highlighting

Conditional highlightling allows you to highlight any noteworthy data in your report:

Highlights

You can establish a sequence of conditions for your data item, each containing its own formatting consequence. For example: highlight turnover over 200,000 in green.

Conditions can be complex, checking several data values, for example highlight turnover over 200,000 in green only if the quality index is also over 70.

Scrivo formats the data item according to the first condition that each data value satisfies, so the order of the conditional highlights is important.