Search Reports

In the UI, Search Components, you can create and manage search reports.

New

When creating a new report, enter a name and the root entity type.

Tip: From the Entity/Persisted menu you can use the “New Search Report” function to springboard a new report for an entity. This will create a basic search report and a search view.

List

Shows all defined reports in your project.

• Create Report: another option to create a new report.
• Edit Report: opens the selected report in the editor, you can also double click on the row in the list.
• Delete Report: deletes the selected report.

Report Designer

Page: Definition

• Drag new fields for the report from the property list to the entity box.
• Remove a field with the delete key.
• If you drop a related entity property outside in an empty space, you can select field from that entity, e.g. the main supplier for the article.

At the bottom of the view, in the Grid View section, you can change the column order and width. Try the right click mouse menu for a column. Here you can hide columns from the initial view, but the user can access them with the customization tools.

Criteria

• Use the “Add Criteria” button in the upper menu to create a new search criterion for the selected entity box.
• Write filter expressions to specify the search result.
• If you have more than one search criteria, you can either add more criteria to the entity box or write one combined criterion with “And/Or”.

To add a report parameter, start with a new expression line for the property you want and use the drop down in the “enter a value” field. Then press the “New Report Parameter” button.

Tip: If your expression is too complicated to be viewed in the visual page, then remove it temporary to be able to access the visual page.

Access your criteria by double-clicking on the name:

The criteria in the visual page:

The criteria in the text page, where you can manually enter more complicated expressions. The selected report parameters appear as an entity id.

If you want a checkbox with a search option that isn’t connected to a Boolean property in your entity, e.g. “Only prices >= 1000”, you can do these steps.

• Use any Boolean property or create a new virtual one.
• Create a new report parameter with this Boolean property. You can rename the description in the form.
• Then use the Boolean report parameter in your search criteria. It will appear as a check box in the form view.

Page: Parameter Form

• The left list shows your report parameters. Drag them to the middle view area.
• Double click and use the right mouse menu options to customize the form objects.

Control

• Report Search Button: you don’t need a search button, the user can start the search with the enter key, but it can be more instructive with a button. Don’t forget to set the display text for the button.

Search View

You need a view to use the search report.

• Create a view without a root entity.
• Add a Search Report control to the design surface.
• Double click the control to edit properties and select your search report.
• If your entity has many records, you can limit the maximum number of rows that will be returned in the result by setting the limit in the field “Max Number of Rows”.
• The option “Show Customization Row” shows tools for the user where they can select which columns to display, group the report and export the result to Excel.
• Open the view from a workflow.

The report in action

This is how it can look in the application. Here the customization row is turned on.