Creating Your First Logi Application Project

Every Logi report is contained within a Logi application project. Of course, an application project can, and often does, contain many reports. In this section, you’ll be creating an application project that will ultimately contain all the reports created throughout the book.

Step 1: Create a new Logi application project folder

In Logi Studio, a new Logi Report application is created by clicking the New button:

or by selecting the File-New Application item from the main menu. 

Figure 2.1: File menu

You’ll be asked to designate an application project folder. Let’s decide to call our project folder MyFirstApplication and place it in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\. Create the new folder, in that location, with that name, and select it. Click OK. 

Hint:  In the future, it may be more useful to create your application project folders in a development folder instead of the root folder of IIS. 

The wizard will now create appropriate folders and files in your project folder and open the project for you in Studio. 

By default, the Prepare a New Application wizard is launched. However, for this example, you’ll manually prepare the new application so select Cancel to exit the wizard. 

Step 2: Register the new application

Every Logi application is a web application and must be registered with the web server. Logi Report provides a wizard to register applications. 

Warning: The Register this application in IIS wizard only works when the web server is IIS. 

Select the Register this application in IIS wizard in the Suggestions panel (lower right-hand corner). 

Figure 2.2: Suggestions Panel

Note: This option is only available whenever the _settings definition is selected in the Application panel (upper left-hand corner).

The wizard will prompt you for the Application Server Name. Click Next to accept the default value (localhost). If Logi Server was not installed on the same machine as Logi Studio, then enter the name of the machine with Logi Server installed.

If the application is registered successfully, you’ll be prompted to select the Finish command.

Step 3: Set the Logi application path

Select the Path element in the Definition Editor panel (center) and enter a value for the Application Path attribute in the Attributes panel (upper right-hand corner). If you selected localhost for the Application Server Name earlier, the value will be:  http://localhost/MyFirstApplication. Otherwise, substitute the appropriate machine name for “localhost”.

Figure 2.4: Attributes Panel – Application Path attribute

Step 4: Set the browser caption

The HTML page caption displayed at the top of the browser windows can be set by selecting the Application element in the Definition Editor panel and entering the application title in the Caption attribute in the Attributes panel. The application caption is rendered as the value for the HTML <title> tag.

Figure 2.6: Attributes Panel - Caption attribute

The default report to display whenever a user navigates to an application without specifying a report is controlled by the Default Report attribute in the Attributes panel. By default, the report with the name Default is displayed. 

Hint: A quick way to set the default report is to right-click the report in the Application panel, and select the Set as Default menu item. 

For example, if the user navigates to http://localhost/MyFirstApplication, then the report dis-played is the Default report. 

When you browse the report, the address displayed by the web browser in its address bar will be:

http://localhost/MyFirstApplication/rdPage.aspx. 

This is because the ASP.NET web page “rdPage.aspx” handles the request all reports. For reports other than the default report, the “rdReport” parameter is required, and indicates the report definition. So the address

http://localhost/MyFirstApplication/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=Default 

is equivalent to 

http://localhost/MyFirstApplication/rdPage.aspx.