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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> FMT forms |
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An FMT form is a text file describing the appearance of the finished report. It therefore includes descriptions of the type of information that shall be included in the report, where this information shall be located, and if the report should have any titles, rows, columns, and so on.
There are report variables located at the positions where information acquired from a TARGET database will be placed by the Report Generator. All report variables have names that begins with an exclamation mark (“!”).
A hash sign (“#”) is located at the end of each row in order to indicate the location where the Report Generator shall step to the next record of the TARGET database that it fetches the information to the report from. (This means that the Report Generator takes one step forward to the next device, wire, cable core or similar, depending on the type of report).
Some important guidelines to bear in mind when creating FMT forms are listed below.
•Only use variables belonging to the TARGET database used by the current report.
•Remember to add a hash sign (“#”) at the end of each row.
•Use <SPACE> to create empty space between variables, titles, and so on. <TAB> may not be used.
•How many characters will the text that will substitute a certain variable contain? The distances between the variables must be sufficient for the text to fit. If the text is too long, it will be truncated (shortened). This is indicated by an asterisk (“*”) in the finished report.
Example:
!POST is used as report variable for the item designation. Let us assume that !POST is followed by !BESK (description) as the next variable. Between them, there are 10 spaces.
!POST !BESK
!POST contains 5 characters. That gives a maximum of 5+10=15 characters for the item designation. A longer item designation must be truncated not to overwrite the description. Therefore, you might need to add more spaces if you would ever have an item designation longer than 15 characters. (“=A1+E12-X100:100” is for example 16 characters long).
•Please remember to leave sufficient space for the substituting text after the last report variable on a row. If the end of the row is immediately after the last variable, there are no room for the text. The Report Generator will never add more characters to the form. It simply substitutes existing characters and therefore, enough space must be available.
•General variables such as plant, location, and so on, which belong to the header, have to be placed in such a way that the Report Generator processes them before reaching the end of the TARGET database. Consequently, they should be placed in the header of the table, at the top of the form, not in the end.
•Always use fixed width typefaces, such as Courier or Lucida Console, where all characters have the same width. If you are using proportional fonts such as Times New Roman or Arial, the columns will probably look odd, and the text dispositions will generally appear as quite ugly.
There are two main types of FMT forms:
Using the links above, you can access detailed descriptions of both.
•A step-by-step description of how you create FMT forms is found here.