ReportView Manager > Modifying an existing ReportView

Before making any modifications to a ReportView used by other reports or templates we highly recommend making a copy of the ReportView to work from to avoid changes to existing reports.

We do this for three reasons:

1.If you do not create a copy and work directly off a Whisper or a corporate-created template, then any changes you make could be overwritten the next time an update to that template is released.

2.Even if you are not working on a Whisper or corporate-created template, the changes you make to a report view will automatically be applied to all reports in the database that use that ReportView. There are some times, like when correcting a spelling error, that you would want this to happen, but most of the time you want to control which reports use the modifications such as added topics.

3.If you create a copy, then you have the ability to version your ReportViews and templates. This means that the name of the ReportView and template using the new ReportView can be appended with a version specification v1.1, 1.2 and so on.

To make a duplicate ReportView, first click the [Save As…] menu button which opens up this dialog:

SaveReportViewAs

Under “New ReportView Description:” give your ReportView a unique name, the easiest way to do this is to add your initials or your company's initials at the beginning or to add a version number to the end.

You also need to select from the following two options:

•Keep the same layouts - If you like the way the layouts are and have no plans to change them you might want to use this option.

•Clone the layouts as new layouts - If you plan on modifying the chapter and topic layouts for your new ReportView and do not want those changes to apply to existing reports and ReportViews that use the same layouts, you would want to chose this option. You must also add either a Prefix or Suffix when cloning layouts so that they are distinguishable from one another.