Choosing the output format from a prompt

After all of the previous recipes, you must have understood by now that reports need to be generated in the PDF format for printing purposes.

The default output format is HTML, which is good for interactive reports with drill-downs and drill-throughs. However, it is not printer friendly. They would see one page of output at a time with navigation links at the bottom of the screen, and hence printing the whole report is not straightforward. For printing, users need to run the report in PDF format. Clicking on the PDF icon resubmits the report query and users have to wait for the execution to finish.

It will be handy to control the report output from a prompt page. In this recipe, we will add a prompt control which asks users to specify the output format. This way, users can think of the application beforehand (interactive, printing, analysis, and so on) and decide whether the output should be HTML, PDF, Excel, or something else.

Getting ready

We will use...