Reports are based on the new layouts engine. They consist of multiple
nested sections. Each individual section (and the report itself)
can have an optional header and footer (which are themselves layouts,
and can consist of multiple pages!).
Two different types of sections are implemented so far:
- a standard section, which has a single, static body layout. This
can be used to embed static layouts mid way through a report
- a "field group" section, which repeats its body layout for
every feature in a layer. The features are sorted by the selected
grouping feature (with an option for ascending/descending sort).
If a field group section has child sections (e.g. another field
group section with a different field, then only features
with unique values for the group feature are iterated over.
This allows nested reports, e.g.
Report
- Country: Australia
- State: NSW
- Town: Sydney
- Town: Woolongong
- State: QLD
- Town: Beerburrum
- Town: Brisbane
- Town: Emerald
- Country: NZ
- State: ... etc
In this example country, state or town groups can have their
own headers and footers which will be inserted in the report.
Reports are configured through a new panel in the layout designer
dialog, which is shown when editing a report (created through
the Layout Manager Dialog). The organizer allows for adding
(and removing) sections to the report, and for selecting which
layout (e.g. headers, footers, bodies) to edit within the
layout designer.
exported, including data defined setting
This replaces the 2.x data-defined "number of pages" setting.
Instead of requiring users to develop an expression to return
the number of pages, instead we allow individual pages to have
a data defined control of whether that page should be included
in the export.
This is more flexible, and works correctly with the mixed page
size model for layouts.
when exporting to PDF
If an individual layout item needs rasterisation in order to
be exported correctly, it can now be individually rasterised
without forcing every other item to also be rasterised.
This allows exports to PDF keeping as much as possible as vectors,
e.g. a map with layer opacity won't force labels, scalebars, etc
to be rasterised too.
To accompany this, a new "Always export as vectors" checkbox
was added to layout properties. If checked, this will force
the export to keep items as vectors, even when it causes the
output to look different to layouts.
Fixes#7885
