How to Create a Custom Report

LogTen Pro gives you extreme flexibility in the types of pilot logbook reports you generate. Using the power of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and virtually any other technology you can use in a web page you can create pretty much anything you can imagine. This article will walk you through creating your first template, and give you the tools you need to start creating whatever you need. Whether you want to add charts, and graphs, or need to track a specific type of flight time on your report, it’s all possible with LogTen Pro.

Getting Started

Report templates in LogTen Pro live in a special folder in your “home” folder, located at ~/Library/Application Support/LogTen Pro/

Here you will find two important folders, “Sample Report Templates” and “My Report Templates”. LogTen Pro will look for your template in the “My Report Templates” folder, so the easiest way to start a new template is to copy one from the “Sample Report Templates” folder into the “My Report Templates” folder.

Style

For each report template there is Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file called “style.css”. In this file you specify the report type, name, description, author, version, number or rows per page, etc. AND here is where you define all the styles that apply to the report. This means you can affect numerous things, including colours, column widths, fonts, sizes, etc.

Going into the details of working with CSS, it’s rules, formats, and capabilities is beyond the scope of this document, however there are numerous references online, that should help you if you are unfamiliar with it. Many things should be fairly obvious simply by browsing the style.css file.

The Report Components

The various report styles, such as one page, two page, totals, have slights different sets of HTML files, however they are very similar. Primarily they will consist of:

• Document Header and Footer

  These will occur only once for the whole report, the header at the beginning, and the footer at the end.

• Page Header and Footer

  These will occur once for each page of the report, the header at the beginning, and the footer at the end.

• Page Row

  These will occur for every row of the report.

Conclusion

With only a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and CSS you can create powerful custom reports. Browse the other help articles in the reports category for detailed instructions on accomplishing specific tasks.