Reports Menu

KVS supports a number of different reports, some of which are accessible from particular places (e.g., the Room Plan that can be printed from the Daily Schedule), but most are found under this menu. All reports are based on HTML templates found in the Templates subdirectory of the KVS working directory. These templates have no content, but define a style set that determines the reports' appearance.

Most reports use the standard template "Report.htm". However, some reports need separate templates. Why? Here's an example: the "room plan" that you can print from the daily plan is designed to be displayed; since it uses a special template, you can choose a large font so that the plan can be read from a distance. If you wish, you can define many other report-specific styles - see below for further information.

The report window

All reports are shown in the window shown below:

At the top is the title of the report followed by (when applicable) the dates to which the report applies. Then comes the content of the report (in this example, there is none), and finally a note indicating when the report was generated.

At the bottom are a number of controls

• With the drop-down list you can select which data item the report should describe (in this case, you could select a student).

• The next two buttons let you choose the starting and ending dates. Some reports use only one date, some require no dates at all. When you click on one of these buttons, a popup calendar appears.

• After making your selections from the drop-down list and the dates, click generate to create the report.

After you have generated the desired report, the next two buttons allow you to control its appearance. Both are drop-down lists - click on the small arrow to see the list. Which options are available depends on the particular report. 

• Columns allows you to choose which columns in the report are visible. Columns that are currently displayed are marked with an asterisk (*). Click a column to change whether is it displayed or hidden.

• Group by allows you to change the way the report is ordered. Choose the column that you want to appear at left - the report will then be sorted by this column.

Finally, the last three buttons are used for printing and saving reports.

• The save all button is used when you want to create a separate, individual report for each possible selection (e.g., for each individual student). See the following section on printing multiple reports for further information.

• The print button prints the current report.

• The save button saves the current report in the Reports subdirectory.

Printing multiple reports

The one disadvantage of using HTML-based reports is that the reports cannot be printed automatically; this is due to the security measures built into browsers. When KVS attempts to print a report, a dialog box is displayed. You must then confirm that you want the report printed.

For single reports, this is no particular problem. However, there are cases where you want to print an entire set of reports. For example, suppose you want to print a separate company bookings report for each individual company you do business with. Doing this by hand would be tedious - but there is a way to automate the process. Although KVS cannot print the reports directly, it can save them, and you can print them using an applications (such as Microsoft Word) that can convert the documents into a different format.

Here is the procedure:

First, you open the report you want to generate for any one of the possible selections, and format it as you desire using the columns and group-by buttons. Then, rather than making a selection, you click the save- all button. A progress bar will appear, and a separate report will be generated for each individual selection available from the drop-down list. The reports are saved in the Reports subdirectory, as usual.

Now you can print the reports using Microsoft Word (which internally turns the HTML files into Word documents). Here's how:

1. Open Microsoft Word
2. Select File:Open
3. In the Browser dialog, go to the directory where the reports were saved
4. Select all of the reports that you wish to print
5. On the toolbar of the dialog window, click Tools:Print

Report templates

When KVS is installed, a default version of "report.htm" is also installed. This file contains styles that control the appearance of most reports. In addition, two specific templates are included for other reports.

For purposes of templates, reports are grouped into categories. You can define a specific template for each category - just copy "report.htm", make the changes you want, and name the new file appropriately. All reports in that category will automatically use the new template.

Below is a list of the categories, the reports they apply to, and the name of the template file they would use. If this template file does not exist, the report will use "report.htm" instead. Templates marked with a star (*) are included in the standard KVS delivery.