Report Types

With WebFOCUS, 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.
• 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 Report canvas. The Matrix Report canvas 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.
• 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.

  For details about free-form reports, see Creating a Free-Form Report.

• Graphs, which can present the same kinds of information as tabular reports, but in a wide variety of two-dimensional and three-dimensional graph types.

  For details, see Creating a Graph.

• SQL requests, which retrieve information using the SQL reporting language, and can directly incorporate WebFOCUS formatting commands. For details, see Using SQL to Create Reports.
• 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. For more information about the Drill Through feature, see Creating a PDF Compound Report With Drill Through Links. For more information about Compound Reports, see Creating a Compound Report.
• 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 Creating a Compound Excel Report.

• 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 Styled Display Format.