This chapter presents a brief introduction to Rave's features. Rave can handle a wide variety of report formats and includes advanced technologies such as mirroring, to encourage the reuse of report contents for quicker changes and easier maintenance. Rave Reports is a visual report design environment offering many unique features that help make the reporting process simpler, quicker, and more efficient. Today, however, more complex reporting requirements exist that are not easily handled by banded layout tools. To solve the problems associated with presenting a visual report of data in a meaningful and informative manner, traditional visual reporting applications have offered banded layout tools geared toward table-style data listings. Reports are a primary means of retrieving information from the data being managed by an application. This chapter was written with the help of Jim Gunkel of Nevrona Designs, the company that developed the Rave engine. For this reason, it's important to have good-quality reports and a flexible architecture to let users customize them. Many more people will probably look at the printed reports than just the users who produce the reports using the programs. Reports must be created with care, because they represent a user interface for your applications that goes beyond and is sometimes more significant than the software itself. Although this chapter focuses on how you can produce a report from the dataset within your Delphi programs, you should always keep in mind the autonomous nature of reports evaluating such a tool. Reporting tools are important because they can perform complex processing by themselves: the reporting subsystem can become a stand-alone application. If you are interested in other Delphi techniques for driving the printer, see the related material on my website (discussed in Appendix C, "Free Companion Books on Delphi"). In this chapter we'll focus exclusively on reports and in particular on the use of the third-party reporting Rave engine included in Delphi 7. Technically, Delphi supports printing in many different ways, from direct text output to the use of the printer Canvas, from sophisticated database reporting to the generation of documents in various formats (from Microsoft's Word to Sun's OpenOffice).
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