The Font toolbar provides quick access to a text component's font and alignment properties. It can also be useful for quickly viewing the font options for the currently selected text component(s).

Reports often take a large part of the development time for an application. Many times, there are many similarities between the design of separate reports. Wouldn't you like a way to reuse portions of a report in another?

This is where Rave's Mirroring technology comes in. When a component is set to mirror another, it assumes the appearance and properties of the component it is mirroring (see the example to the right which shows an address block being mirrored in an international and US address template). The two components can be on the same page, across pages within the same report or on a global page. This is the primary purpose of a global page. You can almost think of it like Delphi's Object Repository, a central location for you to store reporting items that you want accessible to more than one report. If the component is a container control like TRaveSection (similar to Delphi's TPanel), all child components are mirrored as well. When the original component changes, all mirroring components will also change. While the mirrored component cannot change it properties, you can add additional components if it is a container control.

Your customer wants a standard page header and footer on every page of their 50 reports. Now imagine you have all the reports done and your customer wants to change the layout of the headers and footers.

• The Old Way - You would need to open up all 50 report definitions and change them one at a time.

• The Rave Way - You would mirror the standard header and footer on each report you create and then any changes would only have to be done in one location. Also, if the standard header included a large bitmap, your reporting project would only contain a single copy rather than the many copies that a traditional report designer would require.

You have to replicate a pre-printed form. The problem is there are 6 different variations of this form with only minor differences between each.

• The Old Way - Assuming a traditional report designer could even handle this type of report, you would create the first form, cut and paste it into the second, make the minor modifications, then repeat for the other 4 forms, ending up with 6 reports that would be hard to maintain and take up a lot more memory.

• The Rave Way - You would first create the common items of the form on a separate page, then mirror those on each form and add the unique parts for each as needed. If anything ever needed to be changed in the common section of the form, you would only need to change it in one place and since you're sharing most of the form's content, the report definitions take up much less room.

Since we designed Rave to handle even the most complex report designs, we also built in Component Level Locking to allow you to safeguard sections of your report that are complete and tested. This definitely helps out in the maintenance phase of a report project where an accidental movement of a component may not be noticed until your customer goes to print out the report and stuff just isn't where it is supposed to be. You can lock individual components, pages, reports and even the whole project itself.

Memo - This component is used to display fixed text in a word wrapped fashion on your report. Using the MailMergeItems property and the Mail Merge Editor shown below, you can create a mail merge type of report where Rave will replace tokens in the memo text with a replacement string. Note that this replacement string can be edited with the Edit button which will display the Data Text Editor for quite a bit of extra functionality.

Section - This component doesn't really do anything except act as a container for other components. By properly using section components and mirroring, you can create reusable and maintainable reports in no time flat.

Bitmap - This component is used to display a bitmap (*.bmp). Through the FileLink property you can reference a file on the hard disk.

MetaFile - This component is used to display a metafile (*.wmf). Through the FileLink property you can reference a file on the hard disk.

FontMaster - This component is used to control the font characteristics of any text control through their FontMirror properties. See Reuse and Maintenance for more information.

Line - Draws a diagonal line. (This may not seem like a unique feature but did you know that most Delphi reporting tools cannot create a diagonal line visually.)

HLine - Draws a horizontal line.

VLine - Draws a vertical line.

Rectangle - Draws a rectangle.

Square - Draws a square.

Ellipse - Draws an ellipse.

Circle - Draws a circle.

Band - This component is primarily used to create header and footer bands in a banded style report. A band component can only be created within a region and it's purpose is controlled through the Band Style Editor shown below. The Band Style Editor displays a virtual layout of all of your bands for the given print locations of each band or data band. Note that you can create as many band as you like and a band may print in multiple locations if the report design requires it. So for example, if you want a solid horizontal line to appear above and below a detail body, you could create a single band and set it to print on both the Body Header and Body Footer. You can also control the Print Occurrence for a band, having it continue on a new page or column or any combination of occurrence settings. You can set a band to group on specific fields and can create as many different types of group headers or footers as your report requires. Basically, with Rave's band and databand components, you'll be able to create just about any banded style layout that you can imagine.

DataBand - The databand component is fairly similar to a band component except that it is tied to a particular data view and iterates across the rows in the data view. You can link data bands together for master-detail to unlimited levels or multiple details on the same level. Some advanced features that are supported by a databand include KeepBodyTogether, KeepRowTogther, StartNewPage, MaxRows and Orphan/Widow control.