Configuration

The purpose of configuration is to map named events to actions. Most likely an action is a method to be called in the application object but can be anything else. The config.php file is the place to override system wide default action types and action method names to meet your naming conventions.

phpReport lets you configure the real action to be performed for events which triggers one or more actions.

Whenever an event occurs the action defined to an action key will be performed.

For each possible action to be executed you can declare what should be done. Each action key has a default action assigned. Within the config.php file the default actions might be adjusted to meet your personal favorites or to follow business rules of your orgisation.

Action types

Action typ	Action defined by
Call a method in target class	Action is a legal method name
Call a method in any class	Action is an array ([class, method])
Ouput a string	Action is not a legal method name or begins with an :
Throw an error	Action begins with error:
Raise a warning	Action begins with warning:
Do nothing	Action equals false

The following table lists all possible actions, assigned defaults and notices how the % sign the will be replaced during run time.

Action mapping

action key	default value	% replaced by
init	init
close	close
totalHeader	%Header	$grandTotalName
totalFooter	%Footer	$grandTotalName
groupHeader	%Header	group name or group level
groupFooter	%Footer	group name or group level
detail	detail
noData	<br><strong>No data found </strong><br>
noData_n	noDataDim%	dimension id
noGroupChange	error:Current row in dimension % didn’t trigger a group change.	dimension id

Next to the actions parameter you can also declare the following parameters:

property grandTotalName

The name for the grand total group. Will also be used to build actions for action keys totalHeader and totalFooter.

Note

You can always access grand totals by group level of 0.

property buildMethodsByGroupName

When true the % sign actions related to groupHeader and groupFooter will be replaced by the group names. When false by the numeric group level.

That’s the place where you define the type of actions to be performed or the method names.

Actions have a key which will translated to real action names.

Per default the action ‘init’ will call a method called ‘init’. That’s fairly simple. The same is true alse for the ‘detail’ and ‘close’ actions.

The deaufault action ‘totalHeader’ is ‘%Header’. The % sign will be replaced by the value of the ‘grandTotalName’. Assuming ‘grandTotalName’ is unchanged and has the value of ‘total’ the action to be performed is the ‘totalHeader’ method. The same rule applies to the ‘totalFooter’ action.

Similar rules are true for the ‘groupHeader’ and ‘groupFooter’ actions. But as we need an action for each defined group the % sign will be replaced by the group name. Example: You defined group changes for ‘region’. ‘customer’ and ‘invoice’.

region regionHeader regionFooter customer customerHeader customerFooter invoi invoiceHeader and invoiceFooter

You like it the other way. Then name the groupHeader action ‘head_%’ and footerAction ‘foot_%’.

region head_region foot_region customer head_customer foot_customer invoice head_invoice foot_invoice

The same rule with ‘buildMethodsByGroupName’ set to ‘ucfirst’ will result in these actions: region head_Region foot_Region customer head_Customer foot_Customer invoice head_Invoice foot_Invoice

The rules above are very simple to follow so that’s nothing really sopisticated.

Setting the ‘buildMethodsByGroupName’ set to ‘false’ will replace the % sign by the group level. The last example would call those methods

region head_1 foot_1 customer head_2 foot_2 invoice head_3 foot_3

What might look very strange at the first sigth is very powerful when you want to write very flexible apps. Changing the second group from ‘customer’ to ‘branch’ doesn’t change the action group names. While knowing that the group value is passed to the method as a parmeter and that you have easy access to the group names gives you nearly unlimited choices.

Your are not limited to declare how method names are build.

For some actions it is suitable to define a string. Then the string will be appende to the $output variable. A good example is the ‘noData’ action. In many cases you won’t instantiate phpReport when your data query doen’t return any data. But you might also in this cases a report with nice header and footer and in between just printint a message like “Sorry, we couldn’t find any data”. So it’s not worth to create a method in each report which returns such a string. The solution is to declare this string as a default. A : sign at the beginning makes sure that this string is always treated as a string and can not be mixed up with a method name.

The % sign in ‘noData_n’ actions will be replaced by the number of current dimension when the current dimension is greater than 0. See multi dimensional data for more details.

The very last parameter is called ‘userConfig’. This is an optional way how you can pass data around. phpReport isself does’t use this values.

Note

All directives can be altered when initializing a new phpReport. Some even when calling a method.