The Report Explorer
The Report Explorer shows a snapshot of every report object on the report. This lets you browse through all the report objects in a hierarchical tree structure and look at each section and see every object within that section. By clicking on the + or – next to the section name you can expand or collapse the section details. Figure 1-7 shows the Report Explorer with the section Group Header #4 expanded.
Figure 1-7. The Report Explorer window.
The Report Explorer is organized so that the report name is listed at the top of the tree and below it are the different report sections. Within each report section are the report objects placed in that section. When you click on the report object’s name, the designer automatically highlights that object and repositions the designer window so that you can see where it’s at. This makes it easy to locate a report object within a complex report with dozens of other report objects.
You can delete objects from the report using the Report Explorer, but it doesn’t let you add new objects.
Since everything listed in the Report Explorer can be overwhelming for complex reports, there are buttons to filter the list down to a more reasonable size. Along the top of the window are three buttons for filtering items. The first filtering button, Show/Hide Data Fields, toggles the display of the data fields in the report. Considering that 95% of all report objects are classified as data fields, this removes most items from the list. The effect is that you only see the section names (Group Header, Details, etc.) and a few other objects within the sections (e.g. lines, subreports, and charts). The second filtering button Show/Hide Graphical Objects, toggles the display of lines, shapes, images, and charts. The third filtering button, Show/Hide Grids and Subreports, toggles the display of cross-tab objects and subreports.
An example of using the filtering buttons is to locate all the images on a report. By turning off the display of data fields and cross-tabs, you can scroll through the sections and immediately see which ones display images and what those images are.
