Pre-sales reporting questions

[Michael]

Good morning. We use your WPF controls at work. I am looking to purchase another copy of these controls and reporting solution for another company and had a few reporting pre-sales questions, if that is alright.

I have looked at every reporting solution out there and there are many of them, but really none of them have the capability to produce published works. Yours seems to be the closest solution I can find. I saw in your demo that your report book supports a TOC for the entire book, and a TOC for one of the reports within the book (thank you for that example). At the company I am looking to purchase your tools for, I have written a reporting tool to generate our published work. Howbeit, it is 15 years old (on old technology) and I would much rather use a reporting tool like yours.

If you are game, a few questions please. In the following questions, I will refer to each section of the work as a report:

- can the TOC for the report book support both Roman and Arabic numbers? (one report prints Roman page numbers, all the other reports print Arabic page numbers)
- can a report within a report book restart page numbering?
- the report book needs its own cover page, as well as most of the reports within the report book. Do you support this?
- when generating page numbers for the report book, may the incrementing of page numbers skip cover pages?
- several of the reports dynamically reference page numbers in other parts of the report book. Does your reporting solution support page number references that are calculated on the fly (the page number reference in text may reference a past page or future page)? Can I reference tags somehow in the text that resolves these page numbers? If not, may I run the report with these tags set to 0; save off the page numbers as the reports are being generated; cancel it; then run the report again with the tags containing the saved page numbers? I trust I am conveying what I'm wanting to do.
- does your report book, or individual reports, support setting a gutter? I use a 0.3" gutter for both left and right pages so that the enture report book may be three-hole punched.
- for each report in the report book, may I start each of them on the right page? If the prior report ended on the right page, that it would automatically add a blank left page?

Thank you for having a sense of humor to answer these questions, I appreciate it.

[Michael]

I have gong through 10+ pages here in the forum, and based on the responses, I'll answer a couple of my questions.

For my third question regarding the report book having its own cover page is not available when there is a TOC. For some odd reason TOC's have to be the first "report" in a report book. I do not understand that design decision. 

Regarding my last question of starting each report in a report book on the right (odd) page is not available either. The simplest thing would be for each report to have a "StartOnOddPage" flag and if the prior report in the report book ends on an even page, a blank page is added.

There have been a few forum posts on each of these questions. The reporting-tool industry really needs to think about presentation of the reports that are generated and given to end users, or maybe a better way to state it is the publishing of the reports. If I need to print a report book, or show the digital copy of a report in two-page mode, each report should start on the right page; this is standard.

[Eric R | Senior Technical Support Engineer]

Hi Michael,

Thank you for the positive feedback. Let me address the questions one by one below. 

Questions

Question 1: Can the TOC for the report book support both Roman and Arabic numbers? (one report prints Roman page numbers, all the other reports print Arabic page numbers)

• We have such a feature request on our Feedback portal- Table of Context Page Number Format. I have increased the priority of the item by casting a vote on your behalf. I encourage following it to receive future status updates.

Question 2: Can a report within a report book restart page numbering?

• We have three Numbering Styles for Report Book Paging. I believe either ResetNumbering or ResetNumberingAndCount will work for this.

Question 3: When generating page numbers for the report book, may the incrementing of page numbers skip cover pages?

• Unfortuantely, this scenario is not supported. The next answer will elaborate on this more.

Question 4: Several of the reports dynamically reference page numbers in other parts of the report book. Does your reporting solution support page number references that are calculated on the fly (the page number reference in text may reference a past page or future page)? Can I reference tags somehow in the text that resolves these page numbers? If not, may I run the report with these tags set to 0; save off the page numbers as the reports are being generated; cancel it; then run the report again with the tags containing the saved page numbers? I trust I am conveying what I'm wanting to do.

• I am not 100% certain on the desired outcome for this one. However, an important distinction with Rendering and Paging may help clarify this.
• Telerik Reporting includes a set of renderers for each specific output. Because of when the Rendering Extension is processed in the Report Lifecycle, pagination is not known until later which means that dynamic page numbers is not supported. 
• Also, using events in the way described is not supported either. This is because if the report lifecycle is stopped it needs to start over.
  
• However, something might be accomplished with a Custom User Function or using the Interactivity Features, but I would need to fully understand what is possible here.

Question 5: Does your report book, or individual reports, support setting a gutter? I use a 0.3" gutter for both left and right pages so that the enture report book may be three-hole punched.

• We have several Page Setup Settings and the particular one for this that might work is the Margin setting. 

Wrapping Up

I also wanted to mention that all licensed users have access to our Video On Demand training library. I recommend watching the Reporting Course which will provide a solid foundation for working within the framework.

For additional reference, we also provide a publicly avaialable Getting Started Guide for any unlicensed users as well. 

Please let me know if you need any additional information. Thank you for using the Telerik Reporting forums.

Regards,

Eric R | Senior Technical Support Engineer
Progress Telerik

[Michael]

Hi Eric. Thank you for responding to my questions. A few comments.

Question 1: thank you for increasing the priority on this feature request.

Question 2: thanks.

Question 3: okay. This goes back to the comment I made in the original post about report publishing.

Question 4: okay, I understand. The report is generated and then afterwards page numbers are added. So if I were to hook into the data loop itself, looking for a particular piece of data, I won't have access to any page numbers because they don't exist yet. Bummer, but I understand.

Question 5: I have already looked at your Margin settings; Gutter is not one of them. If you are printing a report and it is going into a three-ring binder (for instance), a gutter allows you to move the report information away from the inside of the left and right pages where the three-hole punches go. For instance, in Microsoft Word on the Page Setup form, on the Margins tab, is a Gutter setting just for this purpose.

Thanks again for your time.