Working with Scribe ^® - a Tutorial

This Tutorial will walk you through some of the most important features of Scribe. You will learn how to create reports, cascade them in a drill-down sequence, how to update database tables, and how to extend Scribe by writing your own Java code, among other things.

The Tutorial is based on the Northwind Traders database that contains data on customers, employees, products and suppliers of a fictitious Northwind Traders company. The customers' (and employees') orders and delivery of goods are tracked in Orders and Order_Details tables that are organized along the master-detail lines. The organizational schema of the database is shown in the figure below:

Basic setup

The Northwind database is available in McKoi SQL format; if you have not yet installed it, please do so now, before proceeding with the Tutorial. Once the database installation bundle is downloaded and unzipped, start the database by running dbstart.bat (Windows) or dbstart.bin (Linux). Note that you will need Java on your computer for that; refer to readme.txt file for further instructions.

Scribe Personal, when run after the installation "out of the box", connects to McKoi database. If you prefer to use some other database, select Launch > DB Connection... menu option from the Application Launchpad window:

and set the connection data in Database connection window:

(delete the McKoi connection first, then enter the name of the connection, choose the DB adaptor and set the server location and login parameters).