Skip to main content

Raw styling reports with NRapid


Raw styling reports is s technique that allows us to override the NRapid’s default style sheet without worrying about css.  I commonly use it for quick fixes and generally work really well. But if you want to affect the global aspect of your reports, though, the way to go is modifying the nrapid-default.css file, not raw styling a report at a time. 

A common scenario where you can apply this technique is when you add a table per group in your report. For instance, when you list products by category, grouped by category, you can add a table for each category (this is quite handy when it comes to printing options, more on this in futures posts) and populate that table with the corresponding group of products.

So far, so good, but when you run the report you see something like this:


As you may notice, the columns are not aligned across the different groups and the report looks sloppy, but don’t worry, this can be fixed with a couple of lines of code


Here I just adjust the column width, but you can use any style applicable to html, it just going to work.
And now the layout was fixed.


On the next post, how to work with line breaks and printing options.


You can get the source code of NRapid from here
And the sample app from here
The Northwind database is available from download at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23654

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Moving to Medium

It's been a long time since I want to give medium a try, and finally, I made some time to do it. To get started on the new platform, I'll be doing series on "Getting programming concepts, languages and tools". If it sounds interesting to you, please take a look at the first post  Getting AWK  and spread the word if you like it. I'm not going to migrate old entries to the new web site. They will remain here safe and sound! As usual, thanks for reading!

Working with unattended reports

In this post I‘ll show you how to create reports that NRapid will execute into an unattended mode. I strongly recommend using this kind of reports in automation scenarios only , and let the user see the print preview dialog in the rest of cases. The only difference between this reports and the standard ones, is that you will cannot make use of dialogs, the runtime will always pass in empty views to the ConfigureReport method. The ConfigureReport method will be executed, but you will have to grab the arguments from somewhere else. The execution pipeline is the same that NRapid uses for standard reports. This is the code to print out the whole list of categories in a dialogless mode. Notice that this report inherits from UnattendedReport class, this class tells to NRapid “run the report unattended”. Also notice that this class comes with a convenience method to configure the report with no arguments. You still can override the one that gets the view data but you will always

How to show excel files inside the .NET Webbrowser Control

If you are reading this, chances are you been banging your head against the wall for a couple of hours (or even days) trying to show excel files inside the WinForms webbrowser control. Possible reasons you ended up in here: You had working code that got broke after upgrading from Win 7. Your code doesn’t work the same way between machines running different (newer) versions of IE. A download box pops up every time your app tries to show an excel file inside the webbrowser control (you wanna show the actual content). You just have no clue on how to get excel working into the .NET embedded webbrowser control. You are trying to implement IInternetSecurityManager and don’t know where to start. (Or how don’t know how to delegate calls to your security manager). Among many other, maybe….. Yes, COM is a PITA, so is ActiveX and IE (Embedded or full for that matter). And no, showing excel files inside the webbrowser control shouldn’t be that hard, but sometimes we have