Editing Report Template (section)

=== Selecting Data ===

The data to be loaded into the report comes in the form of tables; each table corresponds to a specific "type" of data. An "Employee" table will contain data for [[Employee|Employees]], and an "Equipment" table contains data about [[Equipment]]. A few of the table names are slightly different than what they might appear in PRS, e.g. the table for [[Task|Tasks]] is named "Kanban". So when you want to generate a report on your tasks, the data you will need will be in the "Kanban" table.

Each table has a number of columns which map to the individual properties of an object, so "Kanban" has columns for its "Number", its "Title", and many others. Each row of the table is a specific object.

It is important to tell PRS what data you need - there exists a vast number of tables that PRS knows how to load, but you will not want PRS to load all this data, since that can take a while. To choose the data you want to report on, navigate to "Data -> Choose Report Data...". This will bring up a menu from which you can select a number of tables to load data for. Several of these are loaded by default, such as the "CompanyInformation" table, "CompanyLogo" table and the table related to the specific data - generating a report for tasks will automatically load the "Kanban" table. Other tables that ''can'' be loaded (but are not by default) are those that are related to the main object. So, since tasks can have associated equipment items, there is also a "Kanban_Equipment" table. The "Kanban_" prefix represents the fact that this is, in a way, a "child table" of "Kanban" - there is a link between the tables. The report designer knows about these relationships between the tables, so the associated relationships can be modelled using the report designer's concepts of Detail Bands (see the [https://www.fast-report.com/public_download/docs/FRNet/online/en/UserManual/en-US/DataBand/MasterDetailRelations.html documentation]). In order to tell PRS to also load the equipment associated with the tasks, check the little box next to "Kanban_Equipment", so that it displays a tick. Then, next time you preview the report (by closing and re-opening the report), PRS will also load the data required.

Note that the "Kanban_Equipment" table does not load every piece of equipment in PRS - it only loads the equipment items that are related to the tasks that you selected - if only one task was selected to generate the report, then the "Kanban_Equipment" table will have at most ''one'' equipment item, since only one piece of equipment is able to be attached to a task.

You can also select particular columns from the data selection window, but at this stage this does not cause less data to be loaded - it just prevents it being displayed in the various windows in the report designer and thus removes from view unnecessary fields that clutter up the screen.