There have been requests by some patrons to change the existing reports to meet the needs of their church's library ministry. Some of these requests over the years have been employed in Media Library Manager. Others have not because the change we were not sure would meet the needs of all patrons, never mind a majority.
To get around this problem we have added a Report Designer function for six major areas of interest. They are:
Because we had no way of knowing what information the user would like included on a report all the fields of the major file have been included with the many of the additional fields of the minor related files.
To add to the overall functionality the Query Designer is also included which would allow the user to really be specific concerning the output of the report.
The reports created with the Report Designer can be saved much like the queries you have created using the Query Designer. We were tempted to remove the existing reports because they can easily be duplicated with the Report Designer but decided against doing so.
Report Designer opening window
This is the opening window for the report designer accessing circulation history. Click the New button to create a new report. Enter the report title and save it.
Define the Report Column Layout
Select the fields you want on the report. If you want to group all titles, for example, under the authors name DO NOT include the author name in this window. You can add the title, copyright year and other information here.
The fields will default to the length defined in our database. The total length of the report line is the sum of all the field lengths. The total length may be to long for the width of the paper.
Warning about the page width being exceeded
If you get a warning that the width is to long you can change the field widths by clicking the Advanced button. High light one of the longer fields, for example the title field. Enter a number in the field length field. I can't tell what the number should be you will have to experiment until you no longer receive the warning message.
Advance settings window
Select the field you would like to edit and click the modify button. You can not only change the field width but the name of the column and other style features of the individual field.
Change the title settings
In our example we changed the length of the title field to 30. You may have to change other fields too, or even remove one to get all of the information on the report. You may also decrease the font size which will effect the total length needed for each line.
Select a sort order
After clicking the Next button you need to select the sort order for the report. We have select to Define our own custom sort order. When you click the Define Sort Order button the following window will open.
Sort Designer
You can select up to 4 sort fields to build a complex sort for your report. We selected the Author Sort. This is way we did NOT select the authors name for one of the columns. This selection will add the authors name in the correct place on the report.
Select the custom sort options
In the above image you can see we have selected the option to display the authors name in the heading, also in the footer and we want to count the number of entries for each author. You can also see that we modified the authors font by changing the default color to navy. (Click the Font button to not only change the color about other features.)
Select other report options
Clicking the font button will allow you to change the font for the detail line which will effect the entire report line.
Enter report notes
Lastly there is a field to enter any notes about the report you would like to remember or let future users know about before the print the report.