10.1 Planning a Group of Reports
Style Intelligence provides a number of features to improve reusability. Most reports are not completely unique, but are created among a set of related reports. These reports may share just a few elements, an entire layout, or may be entirely identical except for the data bound to the elements. Try to decide, in advance, how much overlap there will be among the reports. Then follow an appropriate strategy for reusability:
• If the reports share a common layout and some elements (such as headers, footers, or a title page) use a meta-template to serve as a basis for the reports. See Meta-Templates for further details.
• If the reports will share just a few common elements, such as a header, (while the layout may vary) create report beans to capture the common features. See Report Bean for further details.
• If the reports are identical except for the data source bound to the elements, you do not need to create multiple template files. Instead, create a single template file and bind the data dynamically using script.
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