Progress
Report Builder
Deployment Guide


How Report Engine Generates Reports

Report Engine allows you to run reports from within an application. However, before Report Engine can produce a report, you must first create the report definition with Report Builder. The report definition defines the report characteristics that tell Report Builder and Report Engine where to find the data and how to display and print the data. See the Progress Report Builder User’s Guide for a complete explanation of how to create a report definition with Report Builder.

Report Engine uses the specifications from the report definition, which includes the database connection information, to generate reports. You can specify overrides to the report specifications when you generate reports, using the Report Engine parameters. Report Engine parameters are parameters that allow you to provide and override specific portions of report information. See "Report Engine Parameters," for a complete description of how to use the Report Engine parameters.

Figure 1–1 illustrates how Report Engine generates reports using the database information, report definition, and Report Engine parameters.

Figure 1–1: How Report Engine Generates Reports

Although you can generate reports with either Report Builder or Report Engine, there are two important reasons you might use Report Engine instead of Report Builder:

You can override specifications in the report definition with Report Engine without changing the report definition. This means, for example, that you can create a report definition to display data from a test database and then override the database specifications with the connection information for a production database.


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