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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Concept: Creating Business Form Layouts

Concept: Creating Business Form Layouts

Workday enables you to design and use business form layouts for meeting the exact layout specifications required by your organization. These specifications might include rich text formatting, headers and footers, page breaks, and exact placement of labels, data, spaces, and margins. Report Designer in Workday Studio enables you to use all these types of layout features and more. It is an easy-to-use, graphical layout tool designed specifically for this purpose.
Note that Workday enables you to share your report designs with other Workday customers through solutions sharing. You can upload your report designs so that other customers can use them or modify them. Similarly, you can download and use report designs created by others.

Use Cases for Business Form Layouts

Workday delivers a number of business form layouts as part of individual Workday applications. However, you also have the ability to create custom business form layouts as needed. There are 3 main scenarios for which you might create a business form layout:
  • You want to use a business form layout for a custom report that you've created in Workday.
  • A Workday-delivered report (a
    standard
     report) has a delivered business form layout, but you want to override the delivered business form layout with a custom business form layout. Depending on the specific application with which the layout is used, you might have the ability to override the delivered business form layout directly within the application as described in your Workday application documentation. In addition, you also have the ability to copy any Workday standard report to a custom report; you can then attach a custom business form layout to the custom report. For more information on copying a standard report to a custom report, see Concept: Custom Reports.
  • You want to use a custom business form layout for a standard report that does not have a delivered business form layout. As with the preceding case, you'd first have to copy the standard report to a custom report.

Business Form Layout Considerations

The following recommendations can help you be successful when creating and using custom business form layouts:
  • Use Workday's Custom Report Writer to get the data you want, and use Report Designer to get the layout you want
    . Report Designer is a powerful tool, and it might be tempting to use all of its capabilities, including the ability to filter and manipulate data. However, because it is critical that you keep your report definition (in Workday) in sync with your custom business form layout (in Workday Studio), it is highly recommended that you follow the approach below:
    • In Workday
      : Use the Custom Report Writer to create an advanced report definition that completely satisfies the data reporting requirements for a given report, including any filters, calculated fields, and so on.
    • In Workday Studio
      : Use Report Designer
      solely to manipulate the layout of the report
      . It's generally best to avoid using this tool to manipulate data, filter report results, or make calculations.
    Using this approach not only helps to keep your report definition and business form layout in sync, but also makes your reporting solution easier to understand, modify, and troubleshoot.
  • Keep your Workday report definition and business form layout in sync
    . If you delete a field from your report definition (like
    Legal Name - First Name
    , for example) and that field is used by a business form layout, the business form layout will replace the deleted field (
    Legal Name - First Name
    , in this case) with a blank space. On the other hand, if you add a field to an existing report definition upon which a business form layout is based, the business form layout ignores the new field, unless you update the business form layout to reflect the new field.