Connected Business lets you create an environment with automated, seamless business processes. Today we are going to discuss about an intuitive feature of the Report Center that lets you bind reports to almost any form in Connected Business.
The Bind to Form option lets you tie up a report to a form; the binded report will then be visible when you want to print report from the form. A very flexible feature that can be applied to any reports may it be a custom or template report in Connected Business.
When binding a report to a form, you can either use the Report Wizard or the Report Designer since both have the same interface to bind a report. From the Report Center, let us select one of your existing reports. From the Report Center, let us select one of your existing reports.
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The Bind to Form screen will be displayed. This lets us control to what form the report being modified will be attached and the behavior of the report while our users are accessing parts of the form.
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From the Bind to Form screen, let us first select which form we want to attach the current report to. From the Form column fields click on the ellipsis button to bring out a dialog box that lets you choose the form you want to attach the report to. The dialog box gives you two options on how to select the form:
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- By Menu - when we click the dropdown menu on its corresponding field we will be shown the tree of Connected Business Modules, all of which we can expand to view the forms that we can choose from.
- By Specific Form - When we select the dropdown button of its corresponding field we will be shown a list of all Connected Business forms, arranged alphabetically by name. There is also a search bar that we can search reports with - if we know the specific name of the form we want to select.
To proceed we will select the Customer > Invoice > Find Invoice form from the By Menu option. Afterwards we will select the Visibility Settings of the report to its binded form.
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From the Bind to Form screen let's click the ellipsis button from the Visibility column field corresponding to your earlier selected form. This will display the Visibility Setting form, from which you can select the visibility behavior of the report in its binded form. You can select the report to be Visible and Selected, Visible and Unselected, or Hidden. You can also toggle Visibility Filter to enable specific visibility behavior of the report whenever your defined specifications in the filter are met.
Let's select our preferred visibility setting and proceed with binding the report to a form.
From the Bind to Form screen we can also toggle the Prompt to Save function. Before viewing the binded report, a screen will prompt you to save the report first. By default the property is disabled.
The Filter Setting defines how your report will be filtered when viewed or loaded in the binded form. By default it will use the default filter applied to the report but you can further define the filtering criteria. Dynamic filtering will be at work whenever we enable the Filter Setting to the Bind to Form feature - the first operator are the columns of your report data source, and the second one are the properties of your binded form. the values of the second operator in the filter criteria will determine the data for the first operator.
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Now we will try to print the Sales Invoice form (where we binded the report we modified earlier), to see whether our configuration worked.
From the Sales Invoice form we will click the Print button from the menu options bar to bring out the Print Dialog.
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From here we can see the binded reports to the form are shown in the Report List pane, which will be printed when we choose to print the Sales Invoice form. Notice also in the Filter Criteria pane the Filter Settings we defined earlier from the Bind to Form screen is also shown and will also take effect whenever the criteria set is met.
For more information about binding a report to Connected Business forms, you may refer to our Bind Custom Report to Form documentation or take a look at the Report Center webinar which discusses the nitty-gritty of Connected Business' new report engine - from reports-creation to formatting.