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LESSON

Converting Legacy Reports

Description

Learn about converting legacy reports into the new reporting system. Conversion is not mandatory, but it grants access to all of the new features available in the Ignition 7.8 Reporting module.

Video recorded using: Ignition 7.9

Transcript

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[00:00] When using the new reporting module, your legacy reports will still work after the upgrade, but cannot take advantage of the new features such as scheduling until they are converted. I have my designer for my seven eight gateway in front of me and I've imported this report form this report from a seven seven gateway here. You can see just like in previous versions of the reporting module, if I double click on the report viewer It opens up the report designer just as before. And if we take a look at what is driving the data on this report, if I scroll down to the property editor, we'll see there's this data property, and there's just a simple query that's bringing in all the values on the table. Next, let's take a look at how to convert this simple report. I'll click OK to close the binding window. And on the legacy report of your components, if you right click, you'll see there's this convert option on the menu. We'll click on that and it'll ask us if we want to convert this legacy report into a new project level report object. Which we do, so I'll click OK. Then it'll ask me to name this report. Now by default, it'll use whatever the name of your old report viewer component was using, but let's give it a different name. We'll call it, how about Sine Report. And we'll click OK. After clicking OK, it looks like the report was converted successfully , so I'll click OK one more time. So a couple of things just happened there. First, you can probably see, there are two report of your components now. There's one from seven seven, and there's a new icon here from the new report viewer component in seven eight. The reason there are two report viewer2 components is because the conversion process will not destroy or make any modifications to you legacy report. The reasoning behind this is that we don't want to destroy your old report in the even something went wrong with the conversion process. If there was a problem during converting, you can just delete the new report of your component and the new report and try converting again. It's important to remember that this new report viewer component is technically a different component than the previous report viewer. I can't double click on the new report viewer object to open up the report designer, and if I right click on it, there's no conversion option. Second, you probably noticed that the new report viewer component didn't use the name Sine Report. The conversion process tried to create a new report viewer component with the same name as the last one but because there was already a report viewer seven underscore seven, it went ahead and just incremented the number at the end to seven underscore eight. So it didn't use Sine Report when I typed that in earlier, however if we scroll down here in our project browser, under reports, you'll see that Sine Report is created down below, so that's where the name was used. And additionally the new report viewer component is obviously already set to look at Sine Report. Next if we take a look at the properties on this report viewer of your component, you'll see that there is a single report parameter named data and if we look at the binding on there, it's the same query as before. So let's take a look at what this parameter looks like in the report sections, so I'll click OK here. We'll head up to our project browser and I'll open up our Sine Report in the report section. If we head over to the data panel, you'll see there's data under parameters but it doesn't have a default value. So if we wanted to execute this report anywhere else, we'd need to build a data set and then pass it in to this parameter. Because of this we generally recommend as a best practice any sort of query that your report used be recreated as a data source down below here. That way all you have to do is pass in strings or dates or integers and the query will then take care of itself, but as you can see it works just fine without us doing that. Now that our report's converted, we can go ahead and make use of some of the new functions in the new reporting modules such as the schedule section over here. Once you've finished converting your legacy reports, if you're curious to see how scheduling works or any of the new features in the reporting module, please see the other videos in this course.

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