Navigating a Multi-Page Report With the WebFOCUS Viewer

In this section:

How to:

Normally, a web server returns an entire HTML report to a browser, which waits for all of the report before displaying it. On-demand paging, implemented in the WebFOCUS Viewer, returns one page of a report to a browser instead of the entire report. The web server holds the remaining pages until the user requests them. This feature shortens the time the user waits to see the first page and is especially useful for long reports. It also contains navigational features that enable you to move quickly among the pages of the report.

The WebFOCUS Viewer does not support the table of contents (BYTOC) option because the table of contents option requires all of the data to be on the same HTML page, even though it then filters and only exposes part of the page at a time. The WebFOCUS Viewer splits the output into many pages, only one of which is downloaded to the browser at a time. Accordion reports are also not supported with the WebFOCUS Viewer.

Note that you can use the HFREEZE StyleSheet option to display column titles on every page of output returned by the WebFOCUS Viewer.

The following is page 1 of a 31-page report displayed in the WebFOCUS Viewer.

Notice that the WebFOCUS Viewer is divided into two frames:


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Procedure: How to Navigate in the WebFOCUS Viewer

The WebFOCUS Viewer Control Panel offers several ways to view pages in your report:


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Using the WebFOCUS Viewer Search Option

The Viewer Control Panel contains controls that offer several ways to search your report. Using the Viewer search controls, you can select a string of information, such as a phrase that occurs in your report or a group of numbers, and search for each occurrence of that string. You can further customize your search by matching capitalization of words exactly (a case-sensitive search) or by controlling the direction of your search (either forward or backward from your starting point in the report).

When using the Search option:

  1. The first search starts at top of the document.
  2. The second and subsequent searches start from the last successfully found search string in the direction selected in the Viewer Control Panel. Note that the direction control is to the right of the Search entry field used to specify a search string.

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