These go hand-in-hand. 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 also designed to allow more than one report to be placed on the output. For example, you can place several reports and charts all on a single PDF report. To achieve this, existing reports are moved into an intermediate format called a layout for an existing report, and these are then placed into a container from which the PDF output file is then created.
Further, you may combine the output of several summary reports onto a single layout for an existing report, and include this layout within a container.
The process of preparing layout and container reports
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
Note that although PDF output of a report may span many pages in a vertical direction, with any number of rows, you may only output a PDF report on a single page horizontally.
