[00:00] Built to be intuitive and familiar the reporting workspace has a logical workflow which makes it easy for anyone to create meaningful reports. Before we talk about the workflow, let's first mention where you create and find your reports. Any report that is created in your project will be located in the project browser under reports. You can see my project already has this existing report here, and if you click on reports, we are brought to the welcome tab. Here we can view and access any recently modified reports. Additionally, we have two options to create new reports. We first need to provide the report a name. I'll go ahead and title this as new report. For our options the blank report allows you to design your report from scratch and the tabular report is a template with some sample data and a report design. After making our report selection here, we can go ahead and click on create to generate the report, I'll go ahead and create a blank report. This brings us to the report overview tab, which provides some valuable information at a glance. Towards the top, we again see our report name.

[01:07] This also gives us the opportunity to change the name from here by clicking into the text box. I'll keep it the same for now. Below the name, we have information on when the report was last scheduled to run and when it's next scheduled to run. We also get a snapshot of the report. This is obviously blank for now since we opted to go with the blank report. Now with any new report, we'll need to configure it to show anything meaningful, and the first stop for this is the data tab. On the left hand side, we have two sections showing us our available parameters and data sources. By default, new reports come with these start and end date parameters. These are expressions where our end date uses the now function, which gathers the current time. The start date uses the date arithmetic, to look at the time eight hours previous to now. Parameters are similar to custom properties on vision components, and you can create any number of parameters you'd like. We can make use of this add icon to do so and select a new parameter.

[02:02] This lets us give our parameter a unique name, a type, and a default value. We can also use the add icon to add a number of different data sources. You can see we have different query types, tag data, and alarm journals. I'll go ahead and create an SQL query. Now, if there's a problem with your data sources or parameters, you can make use of the design tab for error checking. When I click on design here, we see this data collection error pop up towards the bottom, letting us know my parameters missing a default value, and that my SQL string cannot be empty. So we'll head back to the data tab and delete our query, and we'll give our new parameter a default string of a fake company name, let's say Builders Incorporated. After defining your parameters and data sources, you are then ready to start designing the report. We'll go ahead and move over to the design tab. If you've ever designed a vision window, the design tab should make you feel right at home. Starting from the top left the structure of a report is represented in the project browser tree, allowing easy visualization of the tree elements on your report.

[03:03] In place of the tag browser, there is a key browser that gives you an easy way to add the data sources and parameters that you configured in the data tab to the report. For example, I could expand the parameter folder and drop in my new parameter to the top left of the page. Once you have a component on the page, if you select it, you can configure it further in the property inspector. Let's go ahead and update the color of my parameter string. We can go to the properties tab and then let's set our text color to blue. Let's also increase the text size a bit with the dropdown menu on the font property, and let's give it a size of 20. You can also grab components off the reporting palette on the far right and add it to the page. These components are reporting specific, so they won't necessarily share the same behaviors you may find with similar components in other modules. Let's go ahead and drag in an x y chart. As you're designing reports, you can make use of the preview tab to get a quick visual feedback on your report. We can see our page has our parameter string now visible and an empty XY chart.

[04:02] Also in the preview tab, you'll see this XML data over on the right here. This is the raw data from my parameters and data sources. So you can see here the value for end date, the value for new parameter, some built-in keys, and the value for start date. Once your report is looking good, you can then start distributing it with the schedule tab. In this tab, you can create a new schedule with the add new schedule icon. In the top right, you can see the screen is split in that this top portion holds our list of schedules, and the bottom portion lets us configure them on the schedule tab. In the configure section we can set the frequency of the schedule. This is built using a cron tab expression, and you can use the common settings to select from a number of preset options. We see options like once per day, once per week, and so on. On the parameters tab, we can override the default value of any of our parameters. Here you'll see that all of my parameters are listed, including my new parameter down there at the bottom. Lastly, you'll see the actions tab. The actions tab is where you'll determine what you want to do with your report on your schedule.

[05:03] If you click on the add new action icon here, you'll see that we can print the report, we can save it to an FTP server, we can save it locally to the gateway and send out an email. If none of these options work, then you also have the option to run your own script. So you can see that when you follow through the intended workflow of report design, you can easily configure and design a report in a quick and intuitive way.