To help explain custom HTML report templates, this topic introduces several examples of increasing sophistication that show how to utilize the Velocity template language in custom HTML code to produce custom RiskVision reports.
Example 1 explains the basics of creating a custom HTML report template and leads to the subsequent examples, which build on each other.
Overview
Users with sufficient privileges can create and modify HTML report templates. HTML reports can pull data from the RiskVision database in the form of data fields, tables, and charts. This is accomplished using embedded Velocity variables and language constructs. An HTML report template is a canonical HTML document with optional Velocity statements before, after, and embedded within the HTML. The HTML markup can be as advanced as XHTML strict or as simple as "quirks mode."
RiskVision limits the size of any HTML template to a fixed maximum, placing a limit on the amount of HTML text that can be entered. Velocity constructs such as loops can be more concise than plain HTML.
Report templates can be used with different data. Because understanding a set of charts takes time, the best practice to use the similar report for related data to facilitate consistency and comparability. A compliance report, for example, might be used for both Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI.
Chart attributes and the objects being reported on are both "parameters" for the report. System reports prompt for parameters every time the report is run, but user-defined reports remember their parameters and do not prompt after the first run. The Parameters links supports changing the parameters after the first run of a custom HTML report.
Report output can be exported as an HTML and loaded into an application such as Microsoft Word in order to produce an even-more polished report (with a cover page, headers and footers, and an index, perhaps).
See also
