Custom Reports and Cables costs

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Custom Reports and Cables costs

http://forums.stardraw.com/Topic13724.aspx

By ScottSauer - 4/20/2015 3:48:21 AM

Hi,
I am just setting up Stardraw on demo mode to see if it is right for our requirements and have a couple of questions.

1. Is there a way to customise any of the reports eg, such as the Price By System and be able to modify to header text to say "Quotation" and to also include system description paragraphs with each system area.
2. Is there a way I can have the reports include any cables that I have entered, for example can I make a cost and sell attribute to cables and have them included in the reports.
3. Each product has installation and project management time as an attribute. How can I have these values correlate to a cost in a report?

I may be trying to use the software outside of its abilities. If this is so it would be good to work that out now.

Thanks heaps, Scott

By Rob Robinson - 4/20/2015 4:54:34 AM

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your questions. They all relate to reports and the customization thereof so the answers are very similar but based on this idea: reports are fixed and cannot be customized but you can use Excel to do whatever you want with the data from your project. Excel is extremely powerful and flexible - most people use it already to deal with pricing and do quotes etc - which is why we have chosen it as the 'catch-all' for tweaking report functionality.

You can't customize the templates in the integrated Reports interface, but you can export all attributes from the whole project from the Products view (File | Export). This creates a .xls spreadsheet which you can then lay out and format any way you want.
From a Block Schematic drawing you can export a Cable Schedule, again in .xls, and add data from this to a report in Excel.
As in (1), export to .xls from the Products view and this gives you a column for each attribute in every product across the whole project.

I hope this is helpful.

By ScottSauer - 4/20/2015 9:42:51 AM

Hi Rob,
Thanks for the info, although I am kind of shocked that the application can't do something as simple as customise a form or tally labour time.
I may look into manipulating the data in excel but ideally was looking for something easier to design and spit out a basic quote efficiently.
Cheers

By Rob Robinson - 4/20/2015 10:35:25 AM

Hi Scott,

Unfortunately it is not at all simple to customize report templates and this is one reason why we do not expose such an interface.

If you've ever worked with a reports authoring tool you'll appreciate that it's a sophisticated discipline requiring specialist knowledge and, usually, dedicated training since the author will need to understand:

Programmatic layout tools
Data field management
Data manipulation including filters, calculations, conditionals and formatting
Construction of programmatically-defined complex hierarchical documents and the object model used to create them
Data-binding to objects in the SD7 model

It really is quite complex and not for the faint-hearted. Moreover, structured report authoring is not a common skillset amongst the Stardraw userbase whereas most users have a good working knowledge of Excel. Report authoring is the sort of thing more commonly associated with (software) developers.

It is these factors, principally, that have led to the decision not to clutter Stardraw Design 7.1 with an authoring environment that very few would find easy or accessible.

I hope this makes sense.