PART 1: Introduction to XF Designer

The Reports Module in dRofus contains a wide range of predefined, ready to use, PDF reports and schedules. These provide the simplest and most commonly used method to get dRofus data to a PDF.

In some situations however you might require greater control over the data used or the layout of the reports, or you might simply want to create a new type of report that does not yet exist.

In these cases the following Wiki pages can help you with using the "Ecrion Design Suite Publisher" tool to design or modify reports. You could use another tool if you prefer, as long as you could use XML1 as a data source, but we have chosen to use Publisher as it is, in our opinion, a high quality tool that is powerful and simple to use and has great support of the XML standards that dRofus is using. It also gives you the ability to export the final report layout for importing back into dRofus so the whole team can generate reports in dRofus using the new layout.

As Publisher is based on the XML standard it is of advantage to have some knowledge of XML technologies such as XPATH.