<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  Report Internals > Appearance > Style Designer

The Style Designer is a tool in the report designer that can be used to create and edit styles in reports. Using the styles and their collections you can change the appearance of the report. The picture below shows the Style Designer dialog:

 

 

Toolbar. On this panel you can find commands used in the style designer.

 List of collections and styles.

 Properties panel of the selected style.

 Description of the selected property.

 The Formatting panel contains the basic controls for formatting components. This is actual for styles such as Component.

 

 

Toolbar

The toolbar contains the basic controls used in the style designer. The picture below shows the control panel:

 

 

The Actions menu contains basic commands to control styles and style collections:

The Open... command allows you to open a previously saved file (*.sts) with a list of styles and style collections.

The Save As... command saves styles and style collections to the *.sts file.

The Create Style Collection... command is used to create an automatic collection of styles.

 

The Add Style menu contains a list of styles for various report items that you can add to the list of report styles and collections:

The Component style can be applied to almost all report items that have the ability to select a style, except for maps, charts, gauges, tables, and cross-tabs.

The Chart style is used for any type of charts.

The Map style is used only for maps in reports.

The Gauge style is used for both linear and radial gauges.

The Cross-Tab style is used for the cross-tab components.

The Table style is applicable only to the table component.

 

The Delete button allows you to delete a selected style or collection from the list of report styles.

This command is used to get a style from a component. To do this, select the component in the report, call the style designer and click this button. The style will be created with the settings as the selected component in the report.

The Settings menu contains commands for managing the list of report styles:

Select the types of styles that you want to display in the list of report styles. By default, all types are displayed. If the type is disabled, and you add a new style of the same type, then all styles of this type will be displayed in the list.   

Set the sorting of styles in the list. First, in the selected order (ascending or descending), collections of styles will be sorted, and then the styles in these collections will be sorted in the same order. Please note that to manually change the order of the list of styles (for example, when dragging a style in the list), you should disable the sorting mode.

 

The Search field. Simply enter a name or other characters from the name of the desired style, and the list of report styles will be filtered.

 

 

Context menu

The context menu of the style designer can be called by right-clicking in the list of styles:

 

 

As you can see from the picture, the context menu contains:

The commands are used to create styles of various types;

The command is used to delete the selected item (collection or style);

The Duplicate style command is used to create a copy of the style from the list. In this case, the duplicate style will be in the same collection, and the suffix Copy1,2,3 will be added to the name of the copied style.

Commands are used to work with the clipboard (Cut, Copy, Paste);

The command is used to create a collection of styles automatically.

 

You should know that, for the collection of styles, some commands from the context menu will be unavailable.

 

 

Hotkeys

You can use keyboard shortcuts to invoke a specific command when working with the style designer. The table below shows the list the commands and key combinations.

 

 

 

Color Collection Editor

When creating a Chart and Map style, you can create a collection of colors for these styles. Applying this style in the report, you can use your own color for every Chart and Map component. You can create a collection of colors in a special editor. To call this editor, you should select the Chart or Map style in the style designer and click the button in the properties panel of the Colors property:

 

 

The Add button is used to add the new color to the collection of colors. By default, the color is White. Then, you need to specify the color you want.

The Remove button is used to remove the selected color from the collection of colors.

Buttons for moving the selected color up and down in the list. The sequence of colors from top to bottom determines the color of report items. The first color in the list is assigned to the first report item, the second color – to the second one, and so on. Therefore, by changing the order of colors in the list, you can adjust the color scheme of the Chart or Map components.

The list of color collections. The number of colors in the collection is unlimited.