Formating Text in a JIT control

rbuser

I added a JIT item that I called 'footer'. This will put in as the text:


ReportName PageNo/PageCount DateTime

I want the Report Name on the Left PageNo centered and date right justified.
The end-user should make the field the entire width of the report (I would
like to make that happen automatically when it is dropped on the form, but I
can't find an event for when it is dropped).

I can put these values in the Text of the JIT control, but I do not know how
to space them out.

I was thinking I could write to the canvas of the TppDBText control, but
there is no canvas for TppDBText.

Is there a better way to accomplish this? Or do you know how to write to the
canvas?


Thanks in advance,
Rob

nardmoseley

Please see the JITPipeline tutorial in the ReportBuilder Developers Guide
and the JITPipeline demos included with the RBuilder\Demos\Reports\Demo.dpr
project.

You need to define three fields for the JITPipeline: ReportName, PageNo,
DateTime. Then inside the report designer, use 3 DBText components.

The TppDesigner.OnCreateComponent fires after the component has been added
to the report layout.

rbuser

> You need to define three fields for the JITPipeline: ReportName, PageNo,
I don't see why I would need JIT to do this. I would just put three system
variables on the form in the report designer.

What I am trying to accomplish is creating ONE JIT Field that would hold
would be formatted in such a way that part would be on the left, part in the
middle and part on the right.

This way the end-user could put one of these in the footer, and we would
take care of putting in the correct data and formating it.

I have many other JIT fields and I know how to use the GetFieldValue event.
I just don't know how to write the data to the field so it is justified the
way we want it.

-Rob

nardmoseley

Conceptually, a datapipeline (JITPipeline, DBPipeline, etc.) contains data
fields that can be bound to data-aware controls. The data-aware controls
read the contents of the datafield: String, Integer, etc. and perform
formatting and rendering. It is possible for the data to contain
formatting - but then you need a special type of data-aware control to read
the formatting and render it. The DBRichText component works in this manner.
It reads a datafield that contains rtf data and uses the formatting info
embedded in the rtf data to render the output.

Based upon the description of what you want the end-user to be able to do, I
can think you need to create a new type of component that can be installed
to the ReportDesigner's Component Palette. This component could be called
'Footer'. I can think of a few ways to try to approach this:

1. One way to do this is to create a special subreport descendant. Check out

RBuilder\Demos\3. EndUser\5. Dynamic Subreport Loading

2. Similar to above, except create a descendant of TppRegion that creates
three child objects (these could be 3 SystemVariables as you mentioned
before). Default the region to ParentWidth of True.

3. Use the formatted data access approach - for this you need a special type
of component to do rendering.