Best Practice F 20

Create a report-master

How to configure a report master in GOM Inspect and save it in the Skin (Package)

The powerful GOM Inspect program allows measurement reports to be generated in the 'Report' workspace. The design of reports is a topic as old as measurement technology itself. The GOM program contains all the useful functions, but finding them when you need them is sometimes difficult and has driven many a programmer to despair.

Below we describe how and where report masters, i.e. templates for the report pages, can be created. We will then show you how you can save your template in a so-called skin (recently called 'package'), i.e. in a general format collection that should also be available in other GOM Inspect projects.

The workflow is as follows.

1. Create a new skin

The skin icon is on the top right of the GOM Inspect screen, to the left of the 'Search' field. You unfold the drop down menu and select 'Manage Skins' at the very bottom.

Here you can see a number of skins divided into two groups, the system skins and the user skins. Now we create a new user skin by copying an existing skin.

We assign a name for this newly created user skin: 'NewSkin'.

2. Select the skin 'NewSkin'

You expand the 'Skins' drop-down menu in the top right and select 'NewSkin'.

In this format collection, we will create a new report master with the following steps. Then we will overwrite and save the skin.

3. Select the report master

In the sub-explorer at the bottom left, switch from 'Pages' to 'Report-master'. The name of the original report master is still there (marked in yellow), but it will be automatically overwritten in our next step.

4. Change logo

Now we change the logo in the report master, which should appear on all reports in the future. To do this, click on the logo that is marked with it. With the TAB key you open the properties menu on the right, where we select the 'Image' area. Here you click on import and load the desired new logo into the report master.

You can now adjust the size and alignment of the logo as desired.

5. Drag report master to report style header

Now comes the crucial step:

The modified report master must now be dragged and dropped from the sub-explorer (below) to the header of the report style 'Style (A4)'. Only this place is allowed, individual report styles or report pages do not work as the target of this operation!


6. Change the report style name

In the header of the report style in Explorer on the left, you can now also change the name of the report style using F2.

Then drag and drop the header of the report style back down into the sub-explorer, the opposite way as before, in order to transfer the name to the report master as well.

7. Review changes in styles

The new formatting (the new logo) has now been applied to all style templates, which can easily be checked in Explorer by selecting the desired templates.

8. Save 'NewSkin'

At the top right we see the skin 'NewSkin' marked with an (*). This means that the current skin (the current format collection) no longer corresponds to the original one, which makes sense to us, since we have changed report masters and report styles.

To save this change (and make it available to all future GOM Inspect projects, we go to 'Manage Skins' at the bottom of the skins drop-down menu and save our 'NewSkin'.

The report master is the template that should contain all the relevant information of a complete measurement report, regardless of the measuring part. Fields with appropriate labels can also be defined here and placed on the template as desired. The styles and skin are then overwritten using the method described above.