Reporter is an OpenROAD application that allows the design of reports through a graphical interface. The reports are stored in the Reporter catalogs as collections of Reporter-defined userclasses and data extracted from OpenROAD system classes representing the fields on the report.

When a report is run within Reporter the graphical definition is converted to a dynamic 4GL procedure which runs an SQL query and calls API functions to prepare an output file which can then be printed with the repprint.exe utility.

Since Reporter reports are not applications or components of applications, there is no direct way to make an "image" of a Reporter report or an application containing a report, as can be done with OpenROAD applications developed in Workbench.

Prior to the introduction of enhanced runtime support, reports had to be run within Reporter, which depended on the Reporter system catalogs to provide the report definition. This imposed limitations on portability, requiring Reports that were moved between sites to be exported from the design database and imported into the runtime database. Customization of the new site may have been necessary also.

The bulk loading of reports was only possible by reloading the Reporter system catalogs. Other portability issues are discussed below.