Techniques for Quick and Easy Formatting

You can apply several formatting techniques to save yourself time and effort. Most of these techniques enable you to use code provided for you by WebFOCUS, or to leverage code that you write yourself:

• Inheritance and overrides. Each report component inherits StyleSheet attributes from its "parent" report component. This powerful feature lets you define common formatting in a single declaration for a parent component, and lets descendant components automatically inherit the formatting, while enabling you to override the inherited values when you wish. By designing your StyleSheet to take advantage of inheritance, you can write less code and can quickly update formatting for multiple report components.

  For example, if you declare all the report data to be blue, all data in all columns will be displayed as blue. If you also declare all vertical sort (BY) columns to be orange, this will override the blue for sort columns, which will be displayed as orange. If you also declare the EMP_ID sort column green, it will override the orange and be displayed as green. For more information, see WebFOCUS StyleSheet Attribute Inheritance.

• Macros. If you are going to specify the same attribute and value in several declarations in a StyleSheet, you can create a "macro" that enables you to apply the attribute repeatedly throughout the StyleSheet without coding it each time. Then, if you ever need to change the value, you can change it once (in the macro), and have the change applied automatically throughout the StyleSheet.

  For example, if there are several parts of a report that you wish to emphasize (such as, titles of important columns, data values that exceed a threshold, and sort headings), and you want all of these to be bold and purple, you could define a macro that sets font style to bold and color to purple, and then apply the macro to all of these report components. For more information, see Reusing WebFOCUS StyleSheet Declarations With Macros.

• Defaults. Many WebFOCUS StyleSheet attributes have default values. Instead of explicitly specifying every StyleSheet attribute, you can omit some and accept their defaults. For example, you can accept the default font instead of specifying a font. You can find each default value of an attribute documented where its syntax is described.