With Developer Studio, you can create the following basic report types using graphical tools:

• Tabular reports. Displays information in rows and columns. This is the basic report type, incorporating the fundamental reporting concepts. Most of the other report formats build on these concepts. You can display these reports in formats such as HTML, Excel, and PDF.

  For details, see Report Painter Basics in the Creating Reports With Report Painter manual.

• Financial reports. Specifically designed to handle the task of creating, calculating, and presenting financially oriented data, such as balance sheets, consolidations, and budgets. You can build these reports with the FML (Financial Modeling Language) Painter, a spreadsheet-like tool that enables you to define the content of the report on a row-by-row basis. This organization provides a number of advantages. You can:
  • Identify and display a title for each row of the report.
  • Perform row-based calculations and include the results at any point on the report.
  • Include the same record in multiple categories.
  • Include many types of formatting enhancements on a cell-by-cell basis.
  • Save individual rows and row titles in extract files.

  For details about the FML language, see the Creating Financial Reports manual.

• Free-form reports. Presents detailed information about a single record in a form-like context that is often used with letters and forms. If your goal is to present a detailed picture of one record per report page, you can use free-form reports to:
  • Position headers, footers, free text, and fields precisely on a page.
  • Customize your headers and footers by including fields as display variables.
  • Incorporate prefix operators in your headers and footers to perform calculations on the aggregated values of a single field.
  • Use vertical (By) sorting to put one or more report records on each page.
• Charts. Presents the same kinds of information as tabular reports, but in a wide variety of two-dimensional and three-dimensional chart types. You can create and customize charts using InfoAssist.
• OLAP reports. Allow users to drill down or roll up data hierarchies, pivot fields from columns to rows (or vice versa), and separate information by filtering or querying data sources based on specified criteria or thresholds.

  For details about OLAP reports, see the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) manual.

• Drill Through reports. Allow users to create a PDF document that contains a summary report plus a detail report, where the detail report contains all the detail data for designated fields in the summary report. Clicking a Drill Through hyperlink navigates internally in the PDF file and no additional reports are run. Drill Through reports are static. You can save the PDF file to disk or distribute it using ReportCaster. When opened with Acrobat® Reader, it retains its full Drill Through functionality.
• Excel Compound reports. Provides a way to generate multiple worksheet reports using the EXL2K output format. By default, each of the component reports from the compound report is placed in a new Excel worksheet. If the NOBREAK keyword is used, the next report follows the current report on the same worksheet.

  For more information, see Linking a Report to Other Resources in the Creating Reports With WebFOCUS Language manual.

• Excel Table of Contents reports. Provides a way to generate a multiple worksheet report where a separate worksheet is generated for each value of the first BY field in the WebFOCUS report.

  For more information, see Choosing a Display Format in the Creating Reports With WebFOCUS Language manual.