Valentina Reports consist of two major logical parts:

• Report Editor – the part of Valentina Studio Pro for designing reports
• Report Engine – the 'vcomponents/vreport.dll' component for displaying reports

Valentina Report Engine (i.e. VREPORT.DLL) is included into all of the following Valentina products:

• Valentina Studio, which also adds visual Report Editor.
• Valentina Server, which uses it to generate reports using templates designed in Valentina Studio Pro.
• Valentina ADKs that use this optional DLL to generate reports at runtime inside of your application.

VREPORT.DLL contains DB drivers (mySQL client, PostgreSQL client, SQLite - the whole engine) and is linked to VKERNEL.DLL, VCLIENT.DLL and ODBC libraries to be able talk with all these databases.

VREPORT.DLL sends READ-ONLY SQL queries to databases and does not modify databases.

Also you can check:

• Valentina Reports FAQs

If you are a software developer and you want to embed Valentina Report engine into your application, what do you need and what steps are required?

Download and install on your developer computer:

• Valentina Studio - to be able to design reports. DOWNLOAD from our site or from Mac App Store .
• Valentina ADK - to be able to use Valentina API classes and methods in your application. DOWNLOAD

You need to have:

• Valentina Studio PRO serial. You will enter it in the menu “Help → Register Product” of Valentina Studio application.
• Valentina Report ADK serial(s) - one per each OS, where you going to deploy your application. You will use it in the Valentina.InitReports() call in your application code.

If your licenses of Valentina Studio Pro and Valentina Reports ADK were purchased separately, make sure the version of Valentina Studio Pro you have supports the database version of Valentina Reports ADK.

1. Design report(s) in Valentina Studio

First of all you need to design one or few reports using Report Editor of Valentina Studio Pro. These reports are stored in the Valentina Project file (*.vsp). This file in fact is a Valentina database with few system tables, where reports are stored in the XML form in a TEXT/BLOB field.

When you design a report in the Report Editor you will be asked to point a datasource. It can be any supported database: Valentina database, SQLite, mySQL, PostgreSQL and ODBC. This datasource should have some set of records, which you will use to test your report during iterations design ↔ preview.

You should check these resources about how to design reports:

• Report Editor Help
• VIDEO LESSONS about Report Editor

2. Generate report(s) from Application code

When you have finished to design report(s) you can use them in your application, thanks to embedded Valentina Report Engine.

You should put prepared .vsp file of your Valentina Project near to your application, because you will need deploy this file together with application. For Windows/Linux applications, the best place is the application folder, for MAC OS X this can be place inside of application package. Important is that your application should be able locate and open this file after installation on a user computer.

Note, that you can mark .vsp file as READ ONLY in your deployment, this will prevent from changes by a user mistake. Also this will prevent creation of Valentina DB journal, what can be helpful for sandboxing of your OS X application.

Note, that from your application code you cannot change a .vsp file. To make any changes in a report, should be used Valentina Studio Pro.

To start work with Valentina Reports you need first of all add into your application code initialization of vreport.dll in App.Open() or in similar place:

App.Open()
    Valentina.InitReports( )
end

Also you need add paired call to finish work with report.dll in App.Close() or in similar place:

App.Close()
    Valentina.ShutdownReports()
end

Between these calls you can work with Valentina Reports. For this you can use two classes of a Valentina ADK: VProject and VReport.

dim my_project as VProject = new VProject
my_project.open( path )
 
' now we LOAD a report template from the project:
dim rep1 as VReport = my_project.MakeNewReport( "report_name",  "sqlite://path_to_db", "SELECT * FROM T1 WHERE fldBalance > 1000" ) 
 
' now we can generate report using some datasource:
rep1.PrintToDisk( path_for_report, EVReportPrintType.kToPDF, 1, 10 )  // generate first 10 pages.

You can check “Examples/VReport” in your ADK installation for details.

You may want to use Valentina Server as a REPORT SERVER. This allows to work in the client/server mode, but with reports instead of databases.

In this mode Valentina Project (.vsp) file is located on a computer where a Valentina Server is installed, and is managed by this VServer. Valentina Studio and your Application(s) can connect to Valentina Server by TCP/IP and ask it generate report as, for example, PDF or HTML. Then client application get back this generated report.

NOTE: It is important to understand that in this case works VREPORT.DLL, which is inside of Valentina Server. So your application can contains only VCLIENT.DLL (+vshared.dll of course) to be able talk with VServer. This can be a good idea for e.g. mobile devices applications.

Of course the most obvious advantage to keep a Valentina Project under Valentina Server is multi-user collective work with it. It is enough to change some report inside of vproject file and all users immediately will get updated version of report.

TIP: Besides, usage of VSERVER can be helpful for even a single developer during development. Because during development we often interrupt debugger at any place. Working with database (.vdb) or with Valentina project file (.vsp) that are under a Valentina Server, we do not insult these files by such unexpected breaks. Your application is stopped, but Valentina Server is still running and still keeps that files open. This also speedups time of your next application start when it opens Valentina database or project, because they in fact are opened.

1) You can create vsp file by Valentina Studio right on your Valentina Server.

2) But usually we need to put existing “*.vsp” file under control of some VServer. For this you need to copy this “.vsp” file into “vserver/projects” folder. Then you need register project to VServer using either GUI of Valentina Studio or SQL command “REGISTER PROJECT”.

If you want totally remove project file from VServer control you need unregister project. For this you can use SQL command “UNREGISTER PROJECT” or GUI of Valentina Studio. Now vsp file is closed and Vserver have forget about it. You can move it out from folder “vserver/projects” to any other location.

To enable your application work with a Valentina Server, you need init Valentina Client:

Valentina.InitClient( 10 * 1024 * 1024 )

After InitClient() you can work actually with both databases and reports managed by a Valentina Server. Please note that this method do not requires any serials, because any Valentina Client is totally FREE.

InitClient() should be paired with ShutdownClient(), which should be the last call to Valentina Client component to shut down it.

Now you need open connection to VServer and them open VProject in the scope of that connection:

dim pc as VConnection = new VConnection( "localhost", sa, sa )
dim myProject as VProject 
 
try
{
    pc.Open()
 
    myProject = new VProject( pc )
    myProject.Open( "project_name_as_registered_to_vserver" ) 
 
    ... some work here ...
 
    myProject.Close()
    myProject = nil
 
    pc.Close()
    pc = nil
}
catch(...)
{
    ...
}