Chapter Basics of reporting. A General Introduction to Reporting

Basics of reporting.1. Structural Elements

The tradition of reporting started with the mainframe computers of the seventies. Programming languages like Cobol (1960) and RPG (report programm generator, 1965) introduced the basic principles used for computer based reporting today.

Reports consist of several bands. Bands are layout container and act as template definitions for the actual content. Each band contains data fields and static text. The fields on the band are placeholders for the data to be printed. When printing bands, the field placeholders get replaced by the actual data. The report processor selects the bands to be printed, fills in the data and finally generates the content.

There are several types of bands for the various special purposes encountered during a reporting run.