Can you preview a report without closing it?

I would ideally like to regularly preview the appearance of a report without needing to regenerate the entire thing, however executing rptview() closes the report so it can no longer be edited.

Any report based object (report, chapter, etc) seems to use the same pointer since modifying one modifies both, so something like below would not work, as it closes both reports.

rpt2 = rpt;
rptview

In theory you could generate two parallel reports, but attempting to append the same object to multiple reports leads to an error as well.

import mlreportgen.report.*
import mlreportgen.dom.*

rpt = Report('test 1','pdf');
rpt2 = Report('test 2','pdf');

tp = TitlePage; 
tp.Title = 'Title'; 
append(rpt,tp); 
append(rpt2,tp); 

Error using mlreportgen.report.ReporterBase/getImpl

Cannot add this reporter to report /test 2.pdf because it has also been added to report

/test 1.pdf.

In which case you'd have to make separate instances of everything you want to add to the report.

Answer 1

[Sandeep Mishra]

Hi Randolph,

I noticed that you are using MATLAB Report Generator to generate reports in PDF format and want to perform the following two tasks: preview the report without closing it and append the same object to multiple reports.

Addressing your first query:

• The MATLAB Documentation for the ‘rptview’ method specifies that it internally invokes the DOM ‘close’ API hence accessing the same report is not feasible. https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2024b/rptgen/ug/rptview.html#mw_f5d2efc9-a0ff-477c-a4b0-ba0369b0bcd9
• A potential workaround is to save a duplicate of the report to an alternate location, preview the copy, and then continue modifying the main report as needed.

Regarding the second query:

• The MATLAB Documentation of ‘append’ function explains a single reporter object cannot be appended to multiple reports. https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2024b/rptgen/ug/mlreportgen.report.report.append.html#mw_bd0cc753-beac-425c-b683-fc1dee1f54f8
• To achieve this functionality, you can create a duplicate instance of the desired object and append these duplicates to different reports.
• Below is an example code snippet demonstrating the approach:

import mlreportgen.report.* 

function tp = createTitlePage(titleText) 
    import mlreportgen.report.* 

    tp = TitlePage; 
    tp.Title = titleText; 
end 

% Create and use title pages in reports 
rpt1 = Report('test1', 'pdf'); 
append(rpt1, createTitlePage('Title for Report 1')); 

rpt2 = Report('test2', 'pdf'); 
append(rpt2, createTitlePage('Title for Report 2')); 

I hope this helps you in resolving your queries!

[Randolph Leiser]

Thanks Sandeep, I appreciate your reply. It seems the fastest/cleanest way to do what I want is using copyfile and running the alternate version without interfering with the main script. I was hoping there might be a more clever way to handle this, but for my current purposes this will serve.