This lesson is part of the Reporting in Ignition course. You can browse the rest of the lessons below.

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Description

This lesson examines the row object on the Reporting module's Table component.

Video recorded using: Ignition 8.0

Transcript

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[ 00:07 ] In this lesson, we'll take a closer look at the rows in the reporting module's table component. You can see that I'm in the design tab of a report and to start with, just to show you what data I have, I'm gonna head over to the data tab and I am using a static csv data source, that's been slightly modified. It only contains a single column and 10 rows. Let's go to the design tab and we know we can come down on key browser, go to the data sources folder and then drag our data source to an empty spot on our page and before I drag my column over, let's talk about the word details here. This row in the table is the details row. We know that this row is repeated for every row in the underlying data source. This table should always give me right now, 10 rows if I had some content in there.

[ 00:59 ] To demonstrate that, I'll simply type details. And of course if we go to preview, we know that it will just replicate the word details 10 times. Now let's go back to the design tab. If I select the table component by clicking on the light gray area here, we can head over to the property inspector and under configure table, we do see there's this row of check boxes down here. Right now we're drawing the details row, that's always on by default. But there's an optional header row which when I check this, draws it at the top and an optional summary row which is drawn below the details row. These are some extra rows we can add to our table. They work a little bit different than the details row. The header always gets repeated on every new page, but only at the top of the table. The summary row is not repeated, you only see it at the very end, after all your data has been printed on a page.

[ 01:56 ] Following our first example, I'll type header into the first column here and summary in the summary row. If we switch over to preview, we can see it starts with header, does all of our details and then ends with summary. Now note, if I go back to the design tab here and say I were to resize my table, so if I just click on the body again, and I make this a little bit shorter. Now what I'm trying to do is make the table smaller, so that we have to create new pages on the report. Just so you can see how the header in the summary work, we'll go to the preview tab, so that we can see that we start with the header, we run out of room at some point, so have another page. We reprint the header, show the rest of our details and then we get our summary.

[ 02:46 ] You can probably tell, the header row is great for headings, the summary row is great for summaries at the end. Let's make this slightly more useful, let's go back to the design tab and I'll go ahead and grab my column from the key browser and I'll drag that into my table on the details row. We'll type something into the headers, I'll just title it, My Column. I wanna get a total, or summary in the summary row. We know that we can go to the key browser, we can check, show calculations and then I can drill into my column key here, grab the total and let's place that into our table here. Just so I don't have to click around, I will resize my table here.

[ 03:27 ] Let's go back to preview. We can see it starts at the top, counts all my rows and gives us a summary at the end. Now it is possible, if you didn't want the header to replicate onto the second page, if you did have multiple pages, we can come up to the design tab here and if I selected the header row by clicking where it says header, or you can just select it in the project browser. If you look down in the property inspector, under the pagination section, you can turn off reprint when wrapped. That's basically what allows the header row to replicate on the new pages. I'm not going to do that but just pointing out that you can do that if you prefer.

[ 04:06 ] Now as I've been clicking around here, you've probably noticed that we have these little white boxes that have vertical lines in them. These boxes state that the row is considered structured. A structured row is basically any other tabular row you can think of. There are a bunch of columns and they're all horizontally adjacent to each other. I could make this row unstructured, which would allow me to reposition my text shapes wherever I want by clicking on the little white box. If I select the details row here, we can look in the property inspector. There's also a property called structured columns which when I re-enable this, does the exact same thing. Really two ways to make a row structured or unstructured.

[ 04:43 ] Now when it's unstructured like this, I'm gonna make a little bit more room, I'm gonna drag the details row down a little bit. When its unstructured, I can reposition these individual columns which again they're just text shapes. They're just floating around inside of this one row. I could actually stack these instead if I wanted to and if we head over to preview, you can see that it's replicating the row with the white space that's putting the word details above whatever the actual count is. And it's doing that for every iteration of that details row. Now this is a little silly, you wouldn't wanna just normally do this. The reason why you care about this, I'll head back to the design tab here. Say you had a lot of columns and you're trying to fit onto this one document. So, instead of trying to fit them all horizontally, or rotating the page, you could just make your rows taller and then position all of your text shapes vertically.

[ 05:35 ] You can also place other components in side of here. So, if I were to select this row, head over to the image component and drag and notice that when I drag inside of the unstructured row here, I get the little blue border, so I can drop that inside of the row. I put little images or icons next to my text shapes. You could also add tables and charts here if you want to, but in some cases it might be easier to use a peer table or a child table, which we'll take about in other videos.

[ 06:06 ] Hopefully that gives you a good idea on the three types of rows, as well as what it means to be unstructured.

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