New Reporting Add-in

This new feature has a number of known limitations at this release, which will be improved in future releases. These include:

• Improving performance while running reports in batch mode

• Background colour not exported in RTF format

• Watermark fails to display in the report

• No Copy / Cut / Paste available in table modifications

• Changing the Zoom in the Report designer causes Report to crash – with Exception error message, which you cannot close, making it hard to close Tags as Report Designer keeps screen focus.

Some other limitations may be worked around as follows:

Drag and Drop of DBView Array Fields to Report Designer

This does not work at present; as an alternative, you can use an Array field in a report and place a control which can be bound to a field on the report. By setting the Data Binding property of the control it can be bound to an array field.

In the example below a Label has been placed in the Detail section of a report for binding to the array field.

Quick Reporting – Handling of Grouping

Where grouping is applied in the search results grid, the group layout result will not be maintained when a quick report is generated.

This is because:

• This would lead to an inconsistency with quick reporting functionality in Instrumentation

• Different layouts need to be maintained for use in the reporting tool for grouped and non-grouped quick reports

  Note:
  To enable group sorting: right click on the search results grid column heading, selecting Enable Group Sorting, and then dragging the column heading of the attribute you wish to group by into the group area of the search results grid (see example below).

Use of Summary in Calculated Fields

Where a summary field is used in a report the results of this summary cannot be used in a calculated field.

This has been identified as a future enhancement. A workaround is available.

Use of the Results of one Calculated Field in Another Calculated Field

It is not possible to use one calculated field in another calculated field.

This has been identified as a future enhancement. A workaround is available.

Not Possible to Hide Group Header Only

In the report designer, hiding a group header via the Group and Sort window also hides the group footer. However, hiding the group footer still leaves the group header visible.

Workaround:
To hide only the group header, assign the height as 0 to group header.

PageRange Property Ignored when the ExportMode Property is set to SingleFile

DevExpress recommends that the ExportMode should be set to any other value to resolve this issue.

AVEVA Net Gateway - Unicode Characters

The field list explorer will not display Unicode characters unless the respective language pack is installed. The user can specify Arial Unicode font for reporting to display multi-byte characters in the report, PDF, excel, without installing the respective language pack.

Reporting Default Values in Cells

When a value is not found, the error text "!Error" is given. In the UDA definition there is a default value defined, which should be in the report.

Workaround:
This workaround removes "!Error" from the report field, and replaces it with empty string.

• Select the cell/label or control in report designer

• Add the script for before print, select new when creating script for the first time.

• Change the text from !Error to desired string as below:

Reporting Document Fails to Attach to the Mail

This occurs for PDF files only when you have a Unicode character in the filename; it does the save but doesn’t send it to Outlook. The workaround is to attach to email or right click the file to send it manually

Quick Report exception thrown

Doing a quick report and then using the HTML VIEW tab throws an exception.

This occurs only with a large number of columns, so the report cannot accommodate them within the visible area.

Large length Reports fail to export at certain formats

A 509 page report exports as PDF, CSV and TEXT, but fails for all other formats. If you run the Excel (XLS) export it warns you and says use (XLSX) but fails on doing so. It can export to the CSV version that can then be loaded into Excel. Even if you select single page versions of the image export it fails.

Reporting output differs for different Excel formats

Exporting the output from Reporting, the data exported differs between XLS and XLSX. The XLSX format creates #VALUE! (errors in the cells that are PDMS REFs in the DBViews); whereas the XLS format creates the data correctly.

This issue arises because export to XLSX format considers the data in Value (object) mode by default. The workaround is to use the Text export mode: please see below: