Im not talking about filling your reports with fluff. I can remember, mistakenly filling my high school essays with fluff and padding. Why use 5 words when 10 can say it more eloquently and fill the word count more quickly. Sadly, there was no pulling the wool over my teacher's eyes - just had to learn more facts!
I have just been helping out on a demo for a customer proof of concept. They wanted the following report output.
Nothing fancy there on the surface, building the report is straightforward enough. We can get this output very quickly.
But have you noticed in the original, there is some space after each set of categories.
We can achieve this by manipulating the 'padding' in the first cell of the row to effectively increase the height of the whole row. This increases the space between the last row of the group and the beginning of the next.
Just insert the following in a form field in the first cell:
<?if:LAST='Y'?> <?attribute@incontext:padding-bottom;'10.0pt'?> <?end if?>
The LAST element was in the XML to define whether the current member of a group is the last. You could equally use a position() based if statement, you just need to have some means of identifying the last member of a give grouping. The next line just manipulates the 'padding-bottom' attribute - here we are making it 10pts. This effectively provides us the row height we need to provide the spacing between the rows we need. There are of course other padding attributes:
- padding-top
- padding-bottom
- padding-start
- padding-end
XSL uses 'end' and 'start' rather than 'right' and 'left' for internationalization purposes. With the extra conditional field we can now generate the required output.
this post kinda begs the question, 'how the heck do you know what you can manipulate?' Well there is the XSL-FO spec available, if you want to wade through it. Personally, I dont very often. My best friend is the Template Builder for Word -> Tools > Export > XSL-FO Stylesheet. this will dump your current RTF template into the browser. There you can check out whats going on in the template. Its not that tough - it's bit like complex HTML, there are tables, rows, cells, etc and each have attributes that you can override to your hearts content. Yes, you have to write some code at the moment, but the extra power in the formatting is worth it I think. I have not touched Oracle Reports (in anger) in a while but I can not think how I would achieve the layout above, not off the top of my head anyway. So get padding!
