Detail Report Bands (for Summary-Detail Reports)

The Detail Report Band is a type of band used to incorporate one report into another in summary-detail reports.

The Detail Report Band is quite different from the reportDetail band since it holds the whole detail report in a summary-detail report layout.

There can be an unlimited number of Detail Report Bands nested inside one another, and every new group of bands is coloured differently in the Report Designer, as illustrated below:

The Detail Report Band cannot be added to a report via the Report Editor like other band types. To add a Detail Report Band, right-click the report and in the Context menu, point to Insert Detail Report. If the bound data source contains a data relationship, the submenu will contain an item with the name of that relationship. Select this item to create a Detail Report Band already bound to a detail table. Otherwise, add an unbound detail report and specify its properties later.

In the Property Grid, the properties of this band are divided into the following groups:

Appearance

• Background Color – Specifies the background colour for the controls contained within the band. This option is also available on the Formatting Toolbar ().

• Borders, Border Color and Border Width – Specifies border settings for the controls contained within the band.

• Font – Specifies the font settings for the controls contained within the band. Some of these settings are available on the Formatting Toolbar.

• Foreground Color – Specifies the text colour for the controls contained within the band. This option is also available on the Formatting Toolbar ().

Formatting Rules – Displays the Formatting Rules Editor which enables you to choose which rules should be applied to the band during report generation, and define the precedence of the applied rules. For further information, refer to Conditionally Change a Control's Appearance.

• Padding – Specifies indent values used to render the contents of the controls.

• Text Alignment – Used to change the text alignment of the controls contained within the band. This option is also available in the Formatting Toolbar.

Behavior

• Page Break – Use this property if the current report design requires that the detail section must be separated from previous sections or follow-ups. Specify the Before the Band or After the Band values to insert a page break before or after the current band. In many cases, this property can be used instead of the Page Break control.

• Scripts – Contains events which can be handled with scripts.. For further information on scripting, refer to Handle Events via Scripts.

• Visible – Specifies whether the band is visible when using the print preview.

Data

• Data Adapter – Specifies the report data adapter settings, used to populate the report data source. A data adaptor is created automatically when the Data Member property is defined. For further information, refer to Summary-Detail Report.

Data Member – Specifies the specific list (database table) in a report data source, from which Reporting objects display data.

Note: It is not usually necessary to specify the Data Member property when binding a report to data. This property should only be set if the Data Source dataset contains more than one table. For further information, refer to Summary-Detail Report (Detail Report Bands).

Determines the data source that provides the detail data for the report. If this property is not defined, the detail report gets data from the primary report data source. For further information, refer to Summary-Detail Report (Detail Report Bands).

Filter String – Displays the Filter String Editor window, which is used to define a filtering condition for report data.

For further information, refer to Change or Apply Data Filtering to a Report.

• Tag – Adds additional information to a report, for example, the id, by which the report can then be accessible via scripts.

• XML Data Path – Used to define a path to data contained in an external XML file. The data contained in the file is used as the report data source.

  In this case, the Data Member property will specify the bound list in the XML data source.

  Note: Note that a detail report uses the XML Data Path property value only when the Data Source property is set to None. The XML Data Path property has a lower priority than the Data Source property.

Design

• (Name) – Determines a band's name, by which it can be accessed in the Report Designer, Property Grid or by scripts.

Misc

• Bands – Displays the Report Editor window, which is used to manage and customise the report bands.

• Level – Specifies the order of several Detail Report Band objects in a report. It enables the reordering of different Detail Report Bands at the same level of master-detail relationships.

• Print when Data Source is Empty – Specifies whether or not a report is printed if the data source is empty.