Container reports are designed to output to the Adobe PDF format only. They do not output their results to any other format. Container reports are designed to allow more than one report to be placed into the output. Container reports are typically used to prepare a reporting pack where multiple individual reports are to be circulated. For example, you can place several reports and charts within a single PDF report. To achieve this, you place existing saved reports into a Container, and then run the Container with its indivudal reports.
A useful point is that you may schedule the Container report to be generated on a periodic basis and then distributed automatically to the appropriate users within your organization.
There is an alternative intermediate format called a layout for an existing report, These layouts may be used to embellish individual reports with styling and to further group individual summary reports into a single output These layout reports may also be placed into the container from which the PDF output file is created.
Sample process of preparing layout and container reports
Container reports also have other attributes that assist in the creation of professional reporting packs. For example, they have title pages for the report, and you may implement headers and footers throughout the document you produce. The headers and footers may contain information such as page numbers and the date of production.
At their simplest, you can use the process to convert a single report or chart to a layout and then place it in a container as a method of outputting the report or chart to a PDF. At a more complex level, the container report may create a PDF that contains many reports that with traditional output must be output one at a time. Also, with the process described here, you can alter the style of many elements of the output, such as the font size and styling of the headers or data on the PDF output. A sample PDF report output over multiple pages may look like this:
PDF output of several report layouts
