Tips, Tricks and Shortcut Keys

ReportMagic Shortcut Keys

Finding IDs to use in MagicSuite Macros

To find the ID of the batch and individual report jobs:

1. On the Schedules page, click the appropriate Schedule then click the Report Jobs button
2. Click the required line then click the View Results button. The URL of this page contains the IDs of the batch job (shown in this example as 32342) and report job (shown here as 71248): https://docs.magicsuite.net/schedules/6621/batchjobs/32342/reportjobs/71248/macroresults
3. Use these ID in your macros, for example: [MagicSuite.ReportJobProperty:id=70358, property=MacroErrorCount] [MagicSuite.ReportBatchJobProperty: id=54832, property=InputFileTransferDurationMs]

What's the Difference between [File.Embed:] and [Xlsx.Embed:] macros?

• [File.Embed:] macro is exclusive to Word input templates. As long as there is an appropriate Excel or PowerPoint file in the Input folder structure, ReportMagic will embed that file into the output Word document, at the location where the [File.Embed:] macro was encountered.
• [Xlsx.Embed:] macro is can be used in Word and PowerPoint templates, and requires XLSX output to be enabled on the Schedule . This macro runs at the very end of report generation when all other macros have finished and then embeds any generated XLSX files into right places in the output. 

Hiding a Section of a Report

If you have part of a report whose macros are written but you don't want to process them in the document, use [Ignore: hidden=true] followed by the content, followed by [EndIgnore:].

Having Commas in an Email Macro

Commas are special characters when used in macros. Therefore, to have commas in an Email macro you can either:

• Replace any commas in the body parameter with the HTML ASCII code ,
  or
• Between [Email:] and [EndEmail:], use a String macro which contains the email text.
  You can also include any HTML tags to format or change layout of the output. For example,
  [Email: subject=Your Performance, to=jane.smith@panoramicdata.com, priority=normal][: `<p>Dear Jane,</p> </br><p >YOU WILL SEE THIS TEXT IN RED.</p><p style='font-family:Arial'>MORE TEXT IN FONT Arial, AND THE COMMA is present.</p><p>Best Wishes,</p><p>Emil</p>`]
  [EndEmail:]

Columns in Tables

Click in the first column and choose Table Properties. On the Columns tab, choose a preferred width for the first column as a percentage of the whole table, e.g. 10%. Click Next Column and choose a percentage preferred width and so on until you get to the last column. With the last column, clear the the Preferred Width box and Word will uses the leftover percent for that column.  The benefit of doing this is that if you add a column later, Word will retains all your column 1,2,3 etc settings so you don't have to redo them.

Normal and Legacy Modes

Most macros that output text have a 'mode' parameter which determines how values generated by the various macros are stored as 'variables'.

In legacy mode (the default for Schedules), the output variable created is a string, and may be formatted.

In normal mode, the output variable is stored as a strongly-typed object, e.g. Int32 (whole number), JArray, JObject, list, boolean (true / false), rather than a formatted string. The benefit of this is that it makes it much easier to feed the output from one macro into the input of another, rather than having to rely on string manipulation such as splitting strings by a delimiter characater.

Report Studio defaults to normal mode - you can change this using the Mode button, or override it individually using mode=legacy or mode=normal in the parameters of each macro.

In each Schedule, you can select "Force normal mode" to have its macros default to normal mode. Again, you can override using the mode parameter for an individual macro. For all existing reports written in legacy mode, and for new reports that have not been written with mode=normal in mind, do not select "Force normal mode" - reports will continue to run using legacy mode, and this may produce some warnings, which you can choose to color green on the Progress page by selecting the Suppress Warnings checkbox on a Schedule.

Note: it is highly recommend to use Normal Mode.