PC-DMIS Tech Tip: This Tech Tip video will show you how to quickly load pre-made report headers into your PC-DMIS inspection report. Tips on linking PC-DMIS variables to a report header cell are also covered in this tutorial..
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In this video, I want to talk about Report Headers and show you a neat trick that allows you to quickly load a custom header that you've made in advance. What we're looking at here is the standard template, the text-only template with a standard Report Header. That Report Header is actually a Label Template. What I've done is I've made a library of my custom headers, and I've just stored them in a special folder. What I can do now is just recall one of them and load it into this template. To do that, all we do is right-click the header and select Change Template. Then we're going to browse for my custom header that I've stored in this folder called Custom Label Templates. You can see I have four pre-made templates that I can easily just load into this report just by simply selecting it. Let's try the First Off Pass. This is a label template. You'll see that refresh. There we go. I've made that ahead of time. I've also tied that header to variables in my program to enter the data that I want. You can see how easy that is. Instead of making your own custom report, you can just make a series of custom headers and load them as you need them.
What we need to do if we want to load a different one now is we actually need to clear the object customization. I'll show you what I mean by that. Let's right-click the header. We need to remove what's called the object modifications. That is the changes I've made to the default report template. All I do is select Template Change Modification. What I want to do is clear that, refresh my report, and then we're back to the default setup here. I'll load one more then I'll explain a little bit on how I created those templates. Let's right-click, select Change Template, go to My Folder, and I'll show you another one I made called Final Inspection Pass. We'll wait for that to load. There we go. In this one, I've added a couple of cells that show the total number of measured dimensions, and a counter for Out Of Tolerance.
Let me show you how I tied variables in my program to this particular header. This is a label template, I need to open the Label Template Editor. Let's go ahead and do that under File, Reporting, Edit Label Template. Let's go to the First Off Pass. That has a lot of variables in it. I just wanted to show you how I did that. We can pick any one of these in this cell here called Machine. If we select that cell and right-click it, you can see what I've done in the Cell expression. You need to type in the code =variable, parenthesis, and in quotations, the name of the variable in your PC-DMIS program. In that, in this case, is machine. You can see there's a few others for operator, inspector and so forth.
After you make your custom template, it's important that we save it as a label template in a folder or a location that we're going to remember. All I did was the Save As, and you can see it's gone to my...that particular folder with all of my custom labels. Let's just cancel that. We'll close the editor and then go back to My Report. Just a quick little tutorial. I just wanted to show you that you don't necessarily need to make your own custom report. You don't need to change the default header. You can just simply load in pre-made templates, and just store them, and create a library, and use them depending on your inspection needs.
I hope you found that useful. Thanks for joining me and we'll see you next time.
