Reports are integral part of Brixxbox. They allow system user's to represent desired information to their clients. Basic example of any Point of Sale System is Order Report, it contains all the information of the user, the details of goods being purchased, and complete bill of whole order. Brixxbox allows system users to create report templates. User can create their own report templates in the form of html templates. Brixxbox keep a list of all report templates created by users and also allow their updation.
In this tutorial, we assume that user has a "customerofferreport". To start working with reports, click on report option under configuration in main side bar of your workspace. You will be prompted to report list page. Here you can add, remove, update, view, and download report templates. Select the play button of "customerofferreport", it will open the report at the bottom of the page. Scroll down to look at report.
As we can see Brixxbox allows to alter different parameters like id, date, and name (shown in black box on top left). By altering thses parameters system user can search different orders provided by the company. On the backend Brixxbox uses Telerik report designer to display or modify reports. If you want to edit or create reports Brixxbox provides you with Telerik Report Designer. You can download this software from top right corner of report's page. Lets say we want to edit customerofferreport, we need to perform follwoing steps:
Download "customerofferreport" from the list of reports.
Open it in the Telerik report designer. As you can see, this is only generic template for this report and there are no specific values associated with the report like customer id. In order to add these details to see specific customer offers, we need to add a data source.
Connect a datasource with your report. For this purpose you need to add your database connection string in Telerik. Brixxbox provides you with specific connection string. In Brixxbox main navigation panel goto Security then firewall, you can find this connection string by clicking "Show workspace DB connection string" button. In below snapshot, this button is highlighted in black. In this connection string, you can find all the important information regarding your workspace in Brixxbox like server name, password. You can also copy whole string by clicking on copy button.
In order to protect any workspace database, all the information is made private. User need to add its ip address to firewall exception list which is also present on the same page in order to access the data. User can add its ip address by clicking on new button and then providing its public ip. User is also allowed to add a range of ip addresses. New button is highlighted in red in above snapshot.
Now, we have DB connection string as well as a white listed user ip and we can add it in DB connection wizard of Telerik. Add it in connection string textbox and click next.
On next page, choose a shared connection so that connection will be saved locally and will be available for all local reports and give an alias name to it eg: custSPSTest20210201.
On next page, we need to specify the sql query to get all the required data from DB regarding a valid customer offer. We can also supply a stored procedure here.
On next page, we need to specify the sql statement parameters on the basis of which the query will be executed. Here we are selecting "parameter.id.Value" which is of type string.
In this page, pass an example value of report id i.e 147. This can be used on next page to test whether the connection with data source is successful or not. As we can see that pressing execute button, a report data with id 147 is being returned. Now user can finish the connection wizard.
We can also add a sub report to an existing report. Just click on sub report section and add a sub report to an existing report. There is only one limitation user needs to take care of which is, the sub report should be of type ".trdx".
