About Report Form Regions

One specialized aspect of the Report type of form is that it is comprised entirely of FlexLayout regions and subregions. This gives you a great deal of flexibility when designing and laying out your Report form.

At the most basic level, the entire Report form is contained within two FlexLayout regions, by default named NavigationFlexLayout and MainFlexLayout.

The NavigationFlexLayout region

The NavigationFlexLayout region hosts the various buttons used during runtime, when you are testing and preparing the report for publishing. This part of the form does not print or publish when you actually generate and publish the report.

The buttons, which are created by default as part of the Report form creation, include these:

Run - This button allows you to actually run the report in a kind of "preview" mode. When you click this button, the system displays the report exactly as it will appear in the published output.
Design - This button allows you to view the basic "template" design on which the report output is built. This can be useful especially when you are designing the report, as it shows you how each region and subregion in the report is designed to display.
Previous - When active, this button displays the page of the report that comes before the currently displayed page.
Next - When active, this button displays the page of the report that comes after the currently displayed page.
Export - This button actually publishes the report to a PDF file, after prompting you for the location to which it should be created.

The MainFlexLayout region

The MainFlexLayout region contains all the content that is actually published when the report is generated. This region itself contains these basic sets of subregions that are used to control the way the report information displays:

Report subregions - These include the Report Header and Report Footer subregions. The Report Header subregion typically displays on just the first page of the report, before any records are processed. It is typically used to show report options.
Page subregions - These include the Page Header and Page Footer subregions. These subregions display on each page and are configured on a page-by-page basis. Examples can include page numbers, site information, user information, company logo, report title, and so on.
Group subregions - These include the Group Header and Group Footer subregions. These are included only if you specified at least one group property in the New Form Wizard. They are used to order and group together data according to the property they are grouped by.
Detail subregions - These include the Detail Header, Detail, and Detail Footer subregions. These subregions are generated repeatedly. The Detail Header displays before the first record in the Detail collection. Then the Detail subregion displays once for each record in the collection. Finally, the Detail Footer displays once after the last Detail record in the collection.

Each of these basic subregions can itself be a container for whatever additional subregions are required to display the information on the report as desired.

Note: Any FlexLayout components you add to the Report type form are normal FlexLayout components and do not include the special attributes built into the FlexLayout regions that were created as part of the original form.

All of these basic subregions must specify a character-based length (height). The heights of these subregions must be a fixed value, as opposed to a flexible value, so that the system can accurately determine which regions can fit on each page as the report is generated.