When you select a main "branch" of the reports tree and click the Insert button to create a new report you will be taken to the report formatted and presented with a blank page or canvas. You then add bands to the report and frames to the bands. To see how this is done look at the example report below. The first band you should add to any report is the detail band. The detail is the main section of a report and will contain the data. Now you will want to next add a Sorting Band. This band is special because it tells the report the order in which to print the data.
After choosing a field for sorting you may next want to add Group Header and Foot bands. In the example report below, I have placed fields for the member's name and address, and a "calculated" field for the combination of City, State and Zip Code fields.
In most cases you will be placing multiple frames with multiple fields on a report band. In this case, I am using a large field and have resized the details band to make it much taller than the default.
In this example we are going to change a report that uses special fields.
The Contents can be just Text that you type into the Contents box, or a field. Click the flashlight to pick a field. The data comes from the processed files, in this case the report dictionary contains the Member information and their related Attendance information.
After adding the Home Phone field in a frame, I want to line it up with the name and address frames. So click the first Field, then hold the CTRL key and click other fields you want to line it up with. When you have selected the fields Right Click and you get a menu with some options.
Let's look at a special type of field which you may find useful.
This frame uses a mail merge field. The contents are quite long. Click the Edit Text button to see what I have entered for this field.
I am using another special type of field in this report, a Calculated field. In this case, it is not calculated like a math formula, but is adding fields together to create a new field.
After designing your report you will want to choose the File, Report Properties menu option to give the report a meaningful name. When you save the report you will be prompted for a name like rtp01.rpt. Change this to something else, similar to the Report Title. Doing this will make it easier to find the report in the reports list.
Ordinarily you will not need to put anything in the report filter. After all whenever you get ready to print the report you can use the Query Wizard to limit the data. However, in this particular case I want to be sure that we don't include records where the member actually was present in class. So I have added a filter so that only attendance records where the field ATT:Present has the value of 'No'.
The best way to learn to use the report builder is to look at my example reports. One more special type of field needs a little more information. Both the Family and Member files include a field for a member photo. The path to the image file is all that is saved in the database - not the image itself. So if we add one of these fields to a report and then save it print we would only see the text, not the image.
So in the above screen shot I have selected the family photo file field, but have change the frame type from "customary" to image from file. By doing this, then resign the frame height and width, when the report is printed it will show the image, not the text of the file name.