Introduction   

Initial setup
General Usage

Part of our service to you is to create customised reports to meet the precise requirements of your school. However, there is inevitably some time delay between your request for a new report and its actual completion and inclusion in your system. In order to give schools with the necessary in-house skills the ability to create their own reports we have created a method for you to do it called External Reports. Using this you can either replace the reports written by us by modified versions of your own, or create completely new reports which can then be included as entries in the various lists of reports within the system.

There are two files that are required in order to set up external reports: SBReports.adp and ReportUpdate.mdb. Both these files are available to download from the website. SBReports.adp starts life as an empty shell and ReportUpdate.mdb is the file which will update SBReports.adp.

Initial setup

Both these files should be downloaded, unzipped and saved to a secure location. Each step is as follows:

1. Open SBReports.adp
   
    
2. Connect to SchoolBase using the main menu bar by selecting File->Connection.
    
   
3. Close SBReports.adp and copy the file, renaming the copy as ReportDesigner.adp. This particular name is not essential but should be something that will identify it as the area in which you will create and modify reports.
    
   
4. Open SchoolBase, go to Forms and Reports in the System menu and register a form named ReportUpdater using a similar title. This should only be made available to data managers so register to either the System or the Data Manager area.
    
   
5. Launch Report Updater from the appropriate user menu.
   
    

6. Select the first option which is to update SBReports.adp from the report update file.
   
    

7. Browse to ReportUpdate.mdb and SBReports.adp in turn. The first time the next step is run, it can take up to 20 minutes depending on the PC. Click the Go button and SchoolBase will import all the reports from ReportUpdate.mdb into SBReports.adp and create SBReports.ade which is a locked executable for distribution (N.B. do not change the name of this file). Future updates will only be incremental and therefore only take a few minutes at most to run.
8. You must now update the system so that SchoolBase will use external reports. Go to the System variables form, select the Options tab and set the variable Use external reports to Yes.
9. SBReports.ade is distributed to all SchoolBase users as part of the normal distribution process and resides in the same directory as SchoolBase. If SchoolBase cannot find SBReports.ade it will revert to using internal reports as a fail-safe.