About Report type forms

Report type forms are specialized Mongoose forms that you can create to produce your own custom reports. Although they are true Mongoose forms, they behave a little differently from the common types of forms.

A Report type of form actually contains only the layout or definition of a report. You might want to publish this report on a regular basis, as a background task in Mongoose, or on a more irregular basis.

The structure of a Report type form

The basic Report type form has two panes, the second of which is subdivided into five basic regions, as in this example.

See About Report Form Regions.

Collections on Report type forms

Report type forms support the use of both primary collections and secondary collections, but not subcollections. This is because the Detail sections are designed to be repeatable sections, and are designed to handle only one row (record) of data at a time.

This means that you cannot use components that display more than one row of data at a time. This includes grids, DataViews, list boxes, trees, and so on. Because subcollections require the use of a grid to display their data, this also means that subcollections cannot be used in Report type forms.

You can, however, use multiple secondary collections to access and display the data you want for your report. You can also establish multiple parent/child(/grandchild, /sibling, etc.) relationships between collections.

The hierarchy between collections is established by means of a Parent Collection property. Available for secondary collections only, this property allows you to specify a parent collection for each secondary collection. This hierarchy is used when processing rows for the report, to determine when each secondary collection is to be processed.

Orientation and paper sizes

The New Form Wizard determines the initial form size and orientation when generating reports. Both the orientation and paper size can be changed later, however. By using Glue properties along with the main FlexLayout region, you can adapt the form design to different paper sizes.