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About Positioning a Thermometer on the Dashboard Subpage of a Smart Report


A page is a component that specifies the visual design of a page in the report. A page component primarily consists of flows, which determine the printable area of the page and may also contain graphics, labels, and various controls. When you run a report, Actuate builds frames to display the data. As each frame is created, Actuate places it in the flow on the current page, starting from the top of the flow and aligning each frame with the left edge of the flow. If a frame is too long to fit in the current flow, Actuate places it at the top of the next flow, which may be on the same page or another page. The main page layout for a Siebel report is specified in the PageStyle child component of the PageList component.

Every section in a report design can optionally have an associated subpage. A subpage is just like a page, except that it fits into a flow on the active page. The active page is the page in the report currently being generated when the subpage starts. Like a page, a subpage contains one or more flows and can contain frames and controls.

You usually use a subpage when you want to change the page style for the contents of a section in the middle of a page. In the case of Smart Reports, a subpage is used to position thermometers, graphics, and report text within the dashboard. In a parallel section such as the one used to implement the dashboard, each flow in the subpage corresponds to one of the report sections in the parallel section. This correspondence is implemented by entering the name of the flow in the FlowName property of each report section component in the parallel section. Normally this property is not used except to pair up report sections and subpage flows in a parallel section.

Figure 28 illustrates the report sections and subpage flows in the dashboard parallel section in the Account Summary report.

Figure 28.  Dashboard Parallel Section Structure
Click for full size image

The standard subpage and flow components are used, rather than specialized ssSmart.rol components. A subpage component is dragged from the Pages toolbar to the section to which it will be added. You then manually resize it by dragging the sizing handles. A flow is dragged from the Pages toolbar onto the subpage area and then resized and positioned. The size of the flow should be sufficient to hold the thermometer, the graph, the report text, or whatever is to be included, and any associated labels. Also, the flows should not overlap, although the text report flow in standard Smart Reports is often the size of the entire subpage for optimal use of space.

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