Creating a New Transmittal Template with the Report Designer

Xrev Transmit has a built in Report Designer, for designing and customising your Transmittal.  To access the Report Designer simply select your Transmittal Type as Historical Transmittal or Single Transmittal.

With the correct transmittal type selected choose Change...

This opens the Transmittal Templates dialog.  This lists out all your Transmittals.  If you've never created a Transmittal Template then this list will be blank.  From here you can edit and existing template, delete a template or create a new one.

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Creating a New Transmittal

1. Begin by selecting New...

2. We recommend using one of our templates as basis, to help guide you on how the template should be setup, although its not required and you can choose not to use a template.  You can select between our A4 or Letter template.  In this tutorial we'll select "Default template on A4 paper".
   
   

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3. This opens up the Report Designer.

4. The Report Designer is divided into 6 areas:

   • Ribbon - Use this to save, and quickly access some of the settings, like changing font styles, alignment and layouts.

   • Tool Box - Use this to add Controls to the document.  The only ones you should really need are:

     • Rich Text - For basic text

     • Picture Box - For placing Logos/images

     • Table - for placing tables/grids

     • Panel - For adding Solid Fill bars like we have in the header of the template

     • Line - for drawing your own lines

     • Page Info - for inserting things like Page Count/Date etc.

   • Report Explorer - Use this to quickly select the various parts of your Report.  Its laid out in a tree so you can expand the headers to select them quickly.  If you click the Field List tab you can see all the fields that can be added to the Report.  To add a field,  simply drag it from the field list onto your report where it will automatically embed itself in a cell of a table or create a label.  You can then customize its properties.

   • Property Grid - This contains all the properties and options available for the selected element.  Use this for adding background colors to cells, changing text alignment/justification, borders, padding, widths and heights, etc.  This is the most accurate way to set settings.

   • Document tab Window - this is where you actually design your report and place all the components.

   • Group and Sort - you won't need to use these

5. A report is made of Bands & Detail Reports, there are different Bands and these have different repeat options.  You can reorder bands, but you cannot change a Bands level, so ensure you add your band at the correct level.  These easiest way to create a band is to Right Click in the Report Explorer and select the type of band you'd like to add:
   
   

   • Report Header - Only gets placed once at the top of the Detail Report.  That is, it won't show on the next page

   • Report Footer - Only placed once at the end of the Detail Report

   • Page Header - Repeats at the top of every page

   • Page Footer - Repeats at the Bottom of every page

   • Group Header - Placed at the top of every page that the Detail Report displays on

   • Group Footer - Placed at the bottom of every page that the Detail Report displays on

   • Detail - The Body of the Report, typically the part where Xrev Transmit is placing the data.

6. As you see in the template the various sections are completed as Detail Reports.  We've only added Group and Report Headers in sections that are likely to span multiple pages.

7. You can re-order the Detail Reports a number of ways but we recommend select this icon and choosing "Edit and Reorder Bands" and then using the Up & Down arrows in the new dialog.
   
   

8. For data that repeats vertically across the columns, you only need to place a field in the leftmost column where the data begins repeating.  Xrev Transmit does the rest behind the scenes when it generates the reports with data.

9. The Detail Report and Header/Footer heights will match what you set them to in the designer window.  So if you leave a big white space at the bottom of your header, there will be a big white space before it starts the section.  The height of a section must, as a minimum match the height of its contents.  You cannot overlap sections.  You can have a watermark in the background though using the overall report properties.

10. For Reports that need to repeat horizontal rows such as the Distribution list and Document List, ensure the Detail Report parent is assigned the appropriate field group.  That is, select the arrow button that shows when you select the Detail Report and ensure the Data Member field is set appropriately.EG: Recipients or Documents.
    
    

     

11. Use the Print Preview tab to see an example of what your report might look like.

12. When you are finished simply save your report and give it an appropriate name.  You can then close the designer.

13. Select the Report you created as your desired Transmittal template and test it out with some real data!

Using Custom Parameters in the Report

There are 2 ways to use custom parameters within your Transmittal Template;

1. Including them in the Transmittal Numbering Rules.  In which case, simply dragging the Field onto the Report will use that rule:

   1. Documents.Name = Sheet Name or Model Name

   2. Documents.Number = Sheet Number or Model Number

2. By adding Custom Parameters. If configured correctly in your Transmittal Settings, your custom parameters will display in the Field List.  In the below example, all parameters ending with _ANZRS are custom parameters.
   
   
   

The below example demonstrates breaking the document fields into their own columns, but equally you could have them all in one field:

Recommendations

1. Set your Margins and Paper Size first

2. You can set your Measure Units in the Properties of the Report.  This is useful if you are copying from Excel, you may want to set these as Points or if from word Millimeters or Inches.

3. To avoid having to set lots of overrides on individual cells in a table, set the default fonts/borders for the entire table for the most common settings.

4. If you need a thick a border on a table, place a panel in the background with a transparent fill and the border weight you desire.  It will give you the "Red" warning as if we exported this to Excel or HTML it would cause issues, but will be fine in a PDF.

5. When working with tables and getting column widths, start with the left column and work your way to the right.  When changing widths using the properties box, its the right side that always moves.

6. If you set a column width to large, such that it would cause its adjacent column to have 0 width, your value won't be accepted and instead it will set the maximum value it can.  As such you may have to move adjacent columns across first to make room to set the width to what you want.

7. There are lots of guides for alignment when moving things about.

8. If you have something outside of the margins or overlapping it will highlight red to show you where a mistake exists.

9. You can use styles to apply alternate shading of rows (Even Style/Odd Style)

10. It is technically possible to write formatting rules and apply them to a table, to do things like highlight the highest revision.