Styles Concepts

Each report control (including report bands) and the report itself, has a group of properties specifying their appearance. For example, Background Color, Border Color, Border Dash Style, Border Width, Font, Foreground Color, Padding and Text Alignment. By default, these properties are set to no, meaning that the properties are obtained from the parent control or band. Appearance-related properties, defined for a parent, are inherited by their child controls. The example describes how to create a color value that is inherited in created child controls and how to override the inherited color.

1. Click the Detail band on the report.

2. On the Properties window, click the Appearance tab.

   

3. Select Red from the Background Color drop-down list.

4. On the Toolbox, select a Label control.

   

5. Click on the Detail blank space to position the control.

   

   The background color of the label control displays with a red background color which is inherited from the Detail band.

6. Click on the label control and on the Properties window, click the Appearance tab.

   

7. Select DarkOrange from the Background Color drop-down list to override the inherited background color.

   

8. On the Properties window, click the green square to the right of the Background Color drop down list and select Reset from the drop-down menu.

   

   The background color of the label control displays with a red background color which is inherited from the Detail band.

   Note:
   Inherited properties are only available for certain controls. For example, the Text Alignment properties of Line container bands are ignored and not inherited by Line controls.

Additionally, styles can be created in a report. Report styles are stored in the Style Sheet collection. A style stored within this collection has the same set of appearance properties as a control or a band.

There are two ways to store report style sheets. The first approach is to save them to external files (using a REPSS extension), and then load them into a report using the Style Sheet Path property in read-only mode. The second approach is to store the style sheets within the report (using the Style Sheet property), the style sheets can be modified and saved with the report itself.

Finally, styles can be assigned to bands and controls. The display of the band or control can be defined from an assigned style, or from the appearance properties. The Style Priority property can be used to define which control properties are defined by the associated style.

By default, all the Style Priority options (for example, Use Background Color and Use Border Color) which follow the structure of the style and appearance properties, are set to Yes (except the Use Text Alignment). This means that any style that is assigned to a control via the Styles property is a higher priority than the properties stored in the control or its parent. If some properties are to be determined by a control, rather than the style, set the corresponding Style Priority options to No.

Note:
If styles contained in a style sheet loaded using the Style Sheet Path property have the same names as styles already contained in a report, the latter styles are overridden.

The example describes how the Style Priority property works.

Note:
When conditional formatting is used, the appearance defined by the conditional formatting has a higher priority than the properties described above.

Another commonly used feature is odd-even styles. These allow the use of alternating data fields in a report, for better readability.