Introduction

The AcuBench Report Composer is an interface for report design and layout that is very similar in appearance and behavior to the AcuBench Screen Designer. The interface includes a graphical design window onto which you can drag and drop report elements to lay out a report. As you add elements to the report, you can use a Property window to configure the appearance and behavior of the element and an Event Editor to tie code to the element.

Before you begin to design your report, you may want to complete the following preparatory steps:

1. If you are using relative, sequential, or Vision indexed files for your data, use the File Designer to create data layout files.
2. If you have created data layout files, define the corresponding data sets for your program.

   Note that these first two steps are not required. You can use the Report Composer to design reports regardless of what data format you are using. If, however, you are able to create data layout files and data sets to describe your data to AcuBench, the IDE provides tools to greatly simplify the report design process.

3. Configure the Report Composer interface, as described in this chapter.

This chapter discusses your options for customizing the tool to suit your needs. The next chapter provides detailed instructions for using the tool.