A technique for documenting a Report Studio Report

This technique demonstrates how to use rendering variables to provide a report documentation page on a report that is visible to authors but hidden when the report is run. This type is documentation is useful for recording the changes that a report goes through over time as well provides a check list area for testing a report when a new author is working on it.

This will help report author to know what and why previous report requirement were i.e to keep track of changes to the reports. Also, help in know in case of migration or upgrading reports to new versions. Step 1: Create a simple report

Step2: Add a new page in the page explore and give it a meaning full name Documentation.

Step3: Go to the Documentation page and insert a table with 10 rows and 1 column. This table is used to record any changes made to the report, ie report version history. We will also see hot to hide the page when we run the report.

Step 4: Add text items to the table row for displaying comments.

Step5: Now when you run the report the users will see documentation page also, but this page should not be visible to user. So we use render variable.

Step 6: Create a new Boolean variable and call it as Hidepage

And insert the fancy expression 1=0, that means the expression is never true which is creating constant clause.

Go to Page ancestor and select page.

And select the render variable property for the page and assign the variable that we have created.

This is done, when you run the report, the first page will not show the documentation part, because we have assigned the render expression to the page property.

Step 7 Now, let us see how to write comment in the query expression which is really useful when authoring the reports. Go to the expression of any data item and type. #/* */# for multi comment