A very useful function of any reporting tool is the ability to turn certain sections of the report on or off depending on the needs of the user. For example, you might want to only show certain sections of a report, or choose to hide the data rows and only show group headings and totals (useful if the user just needs a summary and not the whole thing), or you may want to only show group headers and sub totals where there is more than one data row. This is all pretty basic stuff and you would expect even the most basic of reporting tool to support this function.
You can use a DataBinding to the visibility property to turn it's visibility on and off. This works in so much as it makes whatever you have specified either visible or invisible but it does not support the collapsed function that is standard with most WPF controls. By just making data rows invisible, the report will just show white space (in practice this could be many pages of white space). Obviously, just making areas of the report invisible without collapsing them is rarely of practical use.
Does Infragistics Reporting currently support this collapsed functionality and I've just missed it, or is it something that is likely to be added in the future.
Hi,
Reporting is a rendering/design tool that can be integrated into applications by using Report Viewers.
There is already the capacity to use Conditional Formatting in the design tool to set properties based on the results of the evaluation of conditional expressions. You might like to review this documentation.
http://help.infragistics.com/NetAdvantage/reporting/2013.1/CLR4.0?page=How_to_Use_Conditional_Formatting.html
As described in the documentation this includes “Most of the properties of every control and sections in the report based on the data associated to the report”,…” including visibility, color and font properties, etc.”
Let me know if this is what you had in mind?
Hi Marianne,
Thank you for your reply.
I must apologise for not being clear enough in my original post.
Yes, I am aware that the Infragistics Reporting is a rendering and design tool that can be integrated into reports by using Report Viewers. I have been using it since the very first beta versions and I am aware of both what it is and many of its capabilities and limitations.
I thought I had made it clear that the question was not about whether it was possible to change the format of report objects based upon criteria but rather the way in which the visibility property has been implimented. The question posed was; 'Why Doesn't Infragistics Reporting Support Collapsed as a Visibility State?', not; 'Does Infragistics Reporting support conditional formatting?
Yes, through conditional formatting you can make parts of the report visible or invisible. This works in so much as it makes whatever you have specified either visible or invisible but it does not support the collapsed function that is standard with most WPF controls. By just making data rows invisible, the report will just show white space (in practice this could be many pages of white space). Obviously, just making areas of the report invisible without collapsing them is not always of practical use.
Does Infragistics Reporting currently support this collapsed functionality and I've just missed it, or is it something that is likely to be added in the future?
Here are some examples of scenarios where you might want to use a visibility state of collapsed rather than invisible:
Imagine that you have a report of sales figures grouped by salesman. the user might want to be able to print out the entire report or they may just ant to have the group headers and totals. If the visibility property supported collapsed then the report would simply show a header row and a total for each salesman. By only supporting the Visibility=false then the data rows are all essentially still there just invisible so the report will still be many pages long with the occasional subtotal and group header in the midst of masses of blank space.
Another example might be where you wanted to print out information about a particular salesman. The user may want to have the option to print various details such as, address, contact details, sales figures for the last week/month/year, a photograph, appointment list, telephone call statistics, pipeline summary, etc. If the user were to select only a couple of these options then conditional formatting could be used to specify the areas as Visible=False. However, the report would be filled with lots of blank space where the un-selected options would be if their visibility was set to true.
If Infragistics reporting supported Visibility=Collapsed (as is standard for most WPF controls) then it would be very helpful when producing anything other than the most basic of reports. This is not particularly new or ground-breaking functionality, it has been in most if not all reporting tools for twenty years or more.
I sincerely hope the original question is now clear. It wasn't 'Does Infragistics Reporting support conditional formatting?', rather 'Does Infragistics Reporting support visibility=collapsed?'. And, if it does not, why not and when will it?
Many thanks for your assistance.