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

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