Questions Using Styles in Report Designer

When it comes to using Styles in Report Designer, you have a few options. Thought I'd jot down some notes in case others have some thoughts to add.

Scenario: Let's say you want to modify the Style of a group of fields on a Pick List report.

Option #1

Modify the StylesTemplate that the report is using:

DANGER: That would modify all reports that use the StylesTemplate. In this case TemplateReport.rpx is used by pretty much every out-of-the-box report in the system.

So this option is a bad idea in my opinion.

Option #2

Same as Option #1, except copy TemplateReport.rpx to a new report like PickListTemplate.rpx (or something like that) and change the Pick List to use the new PickListTemplate.rpx as the StylesTemplate.

Downside here is that it can get confusing because your styles would be defined outside of your report.

Option #3

Define Styles within the report using the StyleSheet option where you give your styles a name. This way everything is contain within the report.

Note: with Option #1, Option #2, and Option #3, the end result is that you are creating Styles which then become available to be used on individual fields.

To use a style on a field, populate the StyleName field for the field:

Option #4

Leave the StyleName field empty and modify the style on each field individually using the Style section:

The main downside of this approach is that you need to touch each field individually every time you want to make a style change that applies to all fields. But you can do this easily by holding down Ctrl on your keyboard and selecting all of the fields that you want to change, then your Style section changes will automatically get applied to all fields.

Option #5

Use a combination of a Style and individual cell formatting values.

To do this, you can leave the StyleName value in place which pulls all of the attributes from the Style.

But then you can still override individual style attributes like this Bold attribute for example:

When you override at least one style attribute, you can see that the Style field displays "Custom data" in bold and the individual style attributes that were overridden are also displayed in bold.

My Thoughts

When making a change to an out-of-the-box report, personally I usually go with Option #5 because it's fast and I don't have to think about it too much. Stylesheets are great in theory, but they can be overkill in practice.

But if you are designing a report from scratch, it might not be a bad idea to use them.

What do others think?