RBAddOn is a set of Delphi components from Roberts Browne Limited designed to work with Digital Metaphors ReportBuilder. The component set consists principally of a set of RCL components that can be dropped into a report and work in conjunction with existing ReportBuilder components. There are three non-report components designed to enhance the capabilities of the reporting components. In order to use this component set you must have ReportBuilder.
Most RBAddOn report components descend from the ReportBuilder tppStretchable component and therefore support the ShiftRelativeTo and Stretch properties. In addition the components support ParentWidth and ParentHeight properties. Plain text components also support the Autosize property.
While many of the components replicate the behavior found in their ReportBuilder counterparts they typically offer additional functionality. The plain text and rich text components, both static text and db text versions, provide enhanced merge capabilities. Any pipeline field can be used in a merge field and can have an associated display format. In addition merged text can include merge fields which will also be processed.
All text components have an AlternateTransparent property. When set the property will cause the component to toggle its transparency each time it is printed. This can be used, for example, to produce detail sections with an alternating background color.
The tRBText component also introduces properties to control printing on odd and even pages. Double sided reports can use this property to generate opposing headers and footers.
All text components support the KeepTogether property. When set, the component's text will not be split across page boundaries.
The tRBCodedField component can be used to print text in place of a numeric value. Used in conjunction with the tRBSystemPipeline the component can be used to print different text on each copy of a report.
TRBPageBreak can be used to automatically force a new page when less than a specified amount of space is left on a page. An event is available that can be used to programmatically cause page breaks when desired. Components that ShiftRelativeTo a page break will, of course, start printing on a new page after a new page is forced.
There are six components in the package that are designed specifically for printing traditional calendar layouts. Designed to work in conjunction with either the tRBCalendarDataSet or tRBCalendarPipeline these components provide capabilities for printing many different styles of 7 day by six week calendars.
The tRBSytemPipeline is a tppDataPipeline descendant that provides access to a variety of system information and supports user defined calculations. The pipeline component provides this information to DB aware and merge capable report components as field data. Data available includes: page count, current page number, copy count, current copy number, current date and time, print date and time, report name, template name, Windows Username, RBAddOn version, ReportBuilder version, and application copyright, company name, version, and description.
The tRBCalendarDataSet is a tDataSet descendant while tRBCalendarPipeline is a tppDataPipeline descendant. Both components provide the same functionality. The latter is slightly more efficient while the form allows other data sets to be linked as detail tables. Given a starting and ending month both components provide a stream of records, one for each day, that can be used to print calendars. Data can be provided in either traversal method supported by ReportBuilder. The components calculate the first date that will appear on a 7 day by 6 week calendar and provide 42 records for each month in the range. In addition, the components can be configured to simply provide a single record for each day in the range of dates.
All of the report components provide pop-up tool windows that allow for the non-modal setting of component properties. Collectively these forms are called Properties Editors and support is provided to register new editors either for each class, descendant classes, and/or particular component instances.
