Tutorial: Creating reports (5 / 5)

Tutorial Table of Contents

part 1: Standard report types
part 2: Special report types
part 3: Delivery by email
part 4: On-demand reports with custom settings
part 5: Customizing reports
Part 5 of 5: Customizing reports
Most reports can be fully customized. The exceptions are the totals, and additional product reports. The basic customizations normally mean that you can define if/how the header/footer of the report should be printed, and you can define the number and contents of the columns. By default the reports print the basic data related to reservations. By customizing the columns, you can output absolutely ANY data related to reservations, or the customer who made the reservation, or the resource reserved. You do this using the tags explained in the tag-related FAQ questions (e.g. Q205, universal tags or conditional statements). The customizations go even further than this. You can also:

For now let's concentrate on the typical customization use case: we want to customize our report of arrivals by modifying the table columns. Click Edit next to a report in the dashboard, then click on Click here to edit the template in the report settings page (this link is NOT available when you first create a new report, it's only available later, when editing an existing report). This will open the template page:



Here you first define the general (outer) template which lets you add a header or footer to the report. By default the header includes the date range for the report and nothing else. As you see in the description, the special tag $(results) is used to display the report table itself.

In the lower part of the page you define the number of columns and the special rows (such as header/totals row). You can also click on Customize style which lets you define the stylesheet to customize the look of the table for PDF/HTML reports. After setting the desired number of columns, click on the Edit columns button. This opens a new window:



Here you see some defaults used by standard reports. The header row specifies the titles used in the first row. The $(S_xxx) tags are basically texts which will work with any language. E.g. $(S_STARTDATE) is printed as Start date in English. Feel free to replace this with simple texts. The data rows section lets you define the contents of each column of the report's data rows. Here you'll mostly want to use the tags from Q204. Please note that the contents can include HTML tags, such as <b>bold text</b>. You can also click on Edit as WYSIWYG if you want to use complex HTML and the convenience of a WYSIWYG editor. Of course advance content, such as printing content conditionally, is possible.
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