Reporting

Our Reporting feature allows users to create reports from queries, which will be saved to a file on disk, and displayed using a web browser. Reports will contain information about the child objects of the query that the user is currently viewing. All offline available children, as well as all their properties and their children will recursively be captured and written to the report file. Reports can be used for printing, documentation, or logging purposes. Users may also configure custom styling for the reports.

Creating a report

Please see this video to see how to create and open report files. If you cannot view the video, follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to any query object.
2. Click the "Create Report" button in the left-hand pane.
3. The application picker will immediately be shown. Pick the application you wish to open the XML file with.
   • Due to a security feature of Chrome, the report will not be properly styled. Please use another browser.
   • You may also open the report using a regular text editor. Note that the report will not be styled in that case.
4. Reports will be stored under LocalState/Reports. You may open them again from this folder at any time, or discard them.

Styling reports

The user can completely customize the look and layout of reports in any way they please. We have provided a default stylesheet that can be overwritten or edited. The stylesheet uses the XSLT language, which converts XML data into HTML, which is interpreted by web browsers. XSLT should be uses mostly for creating templates or "containers" for XML elements, while additional (external) CSS files can be used to handle (visual) styling. This is also the approach we used for the default stylesheet.

Editing the stylesheet

Our default stylesheet will be located under LocalState/Reports/Stylesheet. If the stylesheet file or folders do not exist yet, our default stylesheet will be copied to this location upon app startup. The file will never be overwritten again by the default stylesheet, so it is safe to customize the contents of this file to your liking. To revert your changes quickly, you can simply delete the file again, and it will be regenerated once a new report is created, or the app is restarted.

To edit the stylesheet, simply open it with your favorite code editor or notepad. We suggest that you familiarize yourself with the XSLT (as well as HTML) syntax and functions before trying to make changes to this file. You can find an introductory tutorial to XSLT here. Additionally, we have included comments inside the default stylesheet to clarify some of the code. Using XSLT, you can create templates for each individual XML element. To style these templates, you may use external CSS files (or inline CSS styles in HTML). For convenience, we have included an external CSS stylesheet within this XSLT file.

To view the changes you have made to the stylesheet, simply reload the report in your browser, or create a new one.