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• How do I create an invoice?
• Why are subreports repeating multiple times rather than just showing once?
• How can I get a total to show in a document-style report?

invoice

Documents such as invoices and customer statements are created in WorkXpress by using the reporting tool. The reporting tool uses a similar interface to the Data Navigator. To use the reporting tool, navigate to the Search Reports page and click the “Add Report” link in the upper right of the page. To build a report, you will first have to select an item on which to start the data navigation. This item will generally correspond to the type of document being generated. For example, when creating an Invoice, one will generally begin the data navigation on the Invoice item type. To do this, click “From the page items…,” click “Current item of type…” and select Invoice.

The next step is to choose your data and generate the content of the report. There are three types of reports: Documents, Tables and Charts. Since the reporting tool supports subreports, reports can be nested inside one another. An invoice report is simply a document report with a table nested inside it (to display the line items). Subreports almost always start on the same item as the parent report, but generally go across a relationship to access a set of related items. For document reports, choosing and displaying data is done exactly the same as the way by which you'd create an expression in the Expression Builder. For table reports, choosing data is the same as for documents, but displaying it is slightly different. When you go to the output tab, you will see all the fields you chose in the upper part of the output, and an empty table in the lower part. Simply drag the fields into the place on the table where you'd like them to display. To configure a row or a column, click on the field's orange block and select the setting you'd like to configure. Use the “group by” spaces to add fields by which you'd like to group your data. For instance, when creating a table of invoices, you might want to group the invoices first by invoice number then by customer.

The final step is to create an action to run the report. Reports in WorkXpress are always run by actions. This could be done on a link so that a user must click the link to run the report, or it could be done when a certain item or layout saves. It's completely up to the builder to decide. When the action is created, the builder must decide what is to be done with the report. WorkXpress allows the report to be emailed to someone, generated and saved into a file attachment field, or generated and opened. When the report is created and not emailed, you can generate it as free HTML or have it converted into a .doc file, a .xls file, or a .pdf file. When emailed, you have the option of attaching a file to the email. Thus to send an invoice to a customer as an attached pdf, you'd first have an action to run the invoice report and save it into a file field on the invoice item type, then have a second action to send the email report as an email and attach the file stored in the field into which you just saved the invoice report.

To improve the aesthetics of the report, you can use Microsoft Word templates upon which to run the report. This allows you to add pagination, watermarks, headers, footers, to change the page orientation or size, and many more features.

repeating_subreports
Why are subreports repeating multiple times rather than just showing once?

Subreports will always repeat the number of times as records there are in the query. As such, you can't use subreports for calculating totals. You have to precalculate them into a field, then reference that field in the report. I would just put the actions to calculate these totals on the same link that runs the report so you don't have to worry about maintaining those numbers under all various circumstances.

totals_in_document_report
How can I get a total to show in a document-style report?