Creating Custom Report Templates

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Worship Scheduler includes a very powerful reporting tool that allows you to print your worship schedules in a format that you are familiar with. No two congregations print their worship service schedules in the same format, so we decided to provide a way for you to print your schedule in the same (or similar) format you have always done it.
The first step to printing reports in your own format is to create a report template. A template is used to specify how the final report is going to look. Setting up the template is a one time activity. Once you have the template set up, you will only change it when you want to make minor changes to the layout or content of your reports. Each time you print a report using your custom format, the Scheduler will ask you to select a template that specifies that format. Section 4.3 will describe how to actually print a report using your templates. This section describes how to create a template.
The template you create will specify the layout and content of your report. The same report editor is used to display and edit reports and templates. When editing templates, some of the menu items will be a little different than when editing reports, but overall, editing a template is just like editing a report.
As shown in Figure 4.3, the Open Template Editor menu item on the Reports menu is used to open the template editor. When you click on this menu item, the template editor will be opened with a blank template. If you had already created a template that you wanted to edit now, then you would select the Open Template menu item from the File menu. Since this is our first template, we are ready to start at this point.


Figure 4.3 Opening the Template Editor

The first thing we want to do is to put a heading on our report. We type in ‘Schedule of Services’ on the first line and ‘for WestSide’ on the second line. Now we are ready to start adding the actual schedule items to our report. Since this is our custom format, we are going to add the items in the order that they will be conducted in the worship services. First we type the description of each job in the order that we want them to appear. We can give the jobs any description that we want at this point. Usually, the description will be the same description you gave them when setting up the jobs in the database. This is not a requirement though. One example where you might want to deviate is for those serving at the Lord’s table. You might want to put descriptions like ‘Serve Left Side’ and ‘Serve Right Side’.
Next we need to tell the Scheduler where to place the actual data from the schedule that was generated. The template editor allows you to place fields on your template to represent data from the schedule. When a report is generated from this template, those fields will be replaced by actual data. Figure 4.4 shows the menu items that are used to insert fields.


Figure 4.4 Menu Items Used to Insert a Field

Click the Job Field menu item on the Insert menu and you will get the screen shown in Figure 4.5. There are only two options to choose from. The first option is the schedule from which the data will come and the second option is the job from the selected schedule. Figure 4.6 shows the options that we chose for the first field. When we clicked Insert Field, the selected field was inserted after the cursor.


Figure 4.5 Template Fields Screen


Figure 4.6 Selected Template Field

The Insert Field option inserts a code into your template that will later be read in by the Scheduler. This code will not mean anything to you. Do not edit this code or the Scheduler will not be able to properly create a report based on your template. If you make a mistake, then delete the field and insert a new field. You can recognize the fields by the braces { } that surround them. You can still select the field and apply formatting such as font size, font bold, etc. Figure 4.7 shows our template after inserting all of the fields.


Figure 4.7 Template with Fields Added

You will notice that each of the job descriptions are listed only once in the Insert Fields screen that is shown floating on top of our template in Figure 4.7. In our schedule, we had two workers assigned to ‘Serve at Lord’s Table’. We added this field twice to our template. The Scheduler will pick the two workers assigned to ‘Serve at Lord’s Table’ from the ‘Worship Services – Week 1’ schedule and place them into our report. If we had only placed this field in our template one time, then only the first worker would show up in our report, even though two are on the generated schedule. We can place this field on our template as many times as we like, but the Scheduler will only replace the first two fields with workers names since there are only two workers assigned to this job on the generated schedule.
Notice that we changed the descriptions that go in front of the fields. For the ‘Serve at Lord’s Table’ jobs, we added the side of the table that each worker will be on. It doesn’t matter what side the members are assigned to, so the Scheduler will randomly pick which worker is assigned to each side. If it did matter which side the workers were on, then we would have set the jobs up in our schedule with different descriptions. We did this with singng. We set up one job for Singing A.M. and one job for Singing P.M. The reasoning behind these choices were discussed in Chapter 2.
Now we have finished creating a custom template. We have saved the template with the name ‘Custom1’ by using the Save As command on the file menu. Please note that the fields that were inserted into our template are tied to the schedules that we have created and the jobs listed in that schedule. If we make changes to the schedule or the jobs, it may be necessary to delete some or all of the fields from our custom template and re-enter them.