Stimulsoft Reporting – Styles for Reports

Styles are arguably the most important feature in Stimulsoft reporting. Why? Because element of a report has a style attached.
The definition of a style is two-fold. First, you can think of a style as a set of pre-defined formatting instructions that you can
use repeatedly throughout all reports in your application. Let's say each report header must be centered, uppercase, bold, and a
slightly larger font size. Each time you need to apply formatting to the heading, you have to go through the entire process to get
the text the way you want it. If you store the formatting commands in a style, you can apply that style any time you need it without
having to do all of the reformatting.

Possibly more important however is that styles are used to "tag" or identify parts of a report. An example of this is whether text is of data
type Numeric, a String, a DateTime, or an Expression. Styles can be created for complex controls such as Charts and Cross-Tab. These are all examples of styles in Stimulsoft reports.

If you're concerned about whether or not you need to learn styles, we can put it rather simply: you do. Styles allow for quick formatting modifications throughout the report and can be tied into columns or even particular data values to make working with conditional formatting much easier.

There are several reasons for using styles in a report:


• Consistency — when you use styles to format your report, each section is formatted the same and therefore, provides a professional, clean-looking report.
Moreover, these styles definitions can be shared among all reports in your application to given each report a consistent look and feel.


• Easier to Modify — If you use styles in your report consistently, you only need to update a given style once if you want to change the characteristics of all text formatted in that style.


• Efficiency — you can create a style once, and then apply it to any report without having to format each report individually.

Steps for Creating and Applying Styles:

1. Create a style in Ribbon GUI


2. Set a style for a report in Ribbon GUI


3. Create a style in Standard UI


4. Set a style for a report in Standard UI


5. Apply Style to report header






1. Create a style in Ribbon GUI

• Click on Style Designer Icon on the Home Ribbon;


• In the style designer, click on Add Style and select Component;


• Type the name as Report header;


• Type the description as This style will be applied to all report headers;


• Select the text brush color to any color of your choice as per user requirements;


• Select Brush of the background of the text as your choice, I selected glass to make it look cool;


• Set the border if required;


• Set Font and size;


• Set Horizontal and Vertical Align;


• Notice that the style preview changes as you make your selections;


• Hit Save button to save this style definition to used in other reports.

2. Set a style for a report in Ribbon GUI

• Report styles are stored with extension .sts;


• Open style designer to style as style for the report;


• Click on Open Style;


• Browse to the location where your report style has been stored and select it;


• Now Stimulsoft report designer loads all the style definitions.

3. Create a style in Standard UI

• Make sure that you have the style toolbar visible by going to View -> Toolbars -> Style;


• Once you have the style toolbar visible in your report designer click on the Style Designer Icon;


• In the style designer, click on Add Style and select Component;


• Type the name as Report header;


• Type the description as This style will be applied to all report headers;


• Select the text brush color to any color of your choice as per user requirements;


• Select Brush of the background of the text as your choice, I selected glass to make it look cool;


• Set the border if required;


• Set Font and size;


• Set Horizontal and Vertical Align;


• Notice that the style preview changes as you make your selections;


• Hit Save button to save this style definition to used in other reports.

4. Set a style for a report in Standard UI

• Report styles are stored with extension .sts;


• Open style designer to style as style for the report;


• Click on Open Style;


• Browse to the location where your report style has been stored and select it;


• Now Stimulsoft report designer loads all the style definitions.

5. Apply Style to report header

• Add a report title to your report;


• Add a text label inside the report title;


• Change the text to Sales Report and increase the width of the style to span the width of the report;


• Goto Appearance section of the properties of the label and select custom styles;


• Select Report Header;


• No we find that the report title has been formatted as per our style specifications.

The author of the article is Chirag Nirmal and his linkedin profile is
http://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragn

Stimulsoft Report Checker – Cop for Reports

Stimulsoft reporting provides a tool that checks your reports for problems which you may miss. This tool
is unique to Stimulsoft and can be a very helpful feature for quality control. Users can run checks for warnings,
compilation errors, recommendations and even advice. In many cases the report checker can show you a preview of
the report with the problem area highlighted and also provides ways to fix the issues in the report definition file.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create shipping label report in Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf and check it
in Report Checker.Wpf and fix the errors, warnings and recommendations.

The data for this sample report will come from the
Northwind sample database provided by Microsoft.

The demo version of Stimulsoft reporting tools can be downloaded from the website
http://stimulsoft.com/ReportsNetDownloads.aspx.

Steps are required in order to create a simple report:

1. Add a connection to your report


2. Add required data sources to report


3. Add Orders to the report


4. Fix report in Report Checker






1. Add a data source to your report

• Open Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf Designer from start menu, the WPF designer is big improvement of the windows forms designer and looks very similar to the office 2010 interface;


• Select Dictionary Tab in the right pane;


• Select New Item and click on New Connection;


• The new connection wizard gives you various options for different types of connections, namely SQL connection, OleDB connection, XML data and ODBC connection;


• Select SQL connection for this tutorial;


• Give the connection any name that represents the database. For our example I will name it Northwind;


• Click on Build button to create a connection string or paste it into the connection string text area. You can also create your own connection string using instructions given on http://www.connectionstrings.com


• Click on the test button to make sure that the connection string works.

2. Add required data sources to report

• Right-click on the newly created Northwind connection and select New Data Source;


• Select Northwind and click OK;


• Stimulsoft reports will display all data objects that are available for reporting;


• For our example we will selected Orders and Order details tables and click OK;


• Orders and Order Details tables as now available under Northwind connection.

3. Add Orders to the report

• Find Data Band in Toolbox on Left side of report designer;


• Drag and drop the data band from toolbox into the report to create a new data band. When prompted for data source selection just click ok;


• Move your mouse to top right corner of data and to see various small buttons, click on the left most to select data source;


• Select orders to assign orders as the data source of the data band;


• Drap and Drop Text object into the Header to display Orders header;


• We will use HTML formatting to display Orders in Bold. Type <B>Orders</B> to display it in Bold;


• Drag and Drop Order Date, Ship Name, Ship Address, Ship City, Region, Country and Postal Code to the Data Band;


• This report will help users print shipping labels so we will need to a bar code also;


• Drag and Drop the bar code object into the data band;


• Right click on the barcode and select properties;


• Find the Code Property and click on … button on right most corner of the property;


• Drag and Drop the Order.Freight property into the text edit, this tells the report designer to generate barcodes based on value of freight;


• Click on the preview tab to see how the report looks with real data;


• Save the file as Order.mrt as a known location.

4. Fix report in Report Checker

• Open report checker from start menu;


• Click on the Open button and browse to Orders.mtr and click on Open;


• Report Checker will scan Order.mrt and display its findings;


• We can see that there are 2 warnings;


• The first warning shows as one of the components in the report is outside the page;


• To view which component is outside the page, simple move your move over to the magnifying glass to see a preview;


• We can clearly see that the bar code is highlighted in Red and is outside the page;


• I don’t need to go back to the report designer to fix, I can simply click on Move to page or To Print Area to fix this;


• Now I can go back to the report designer to see that the bar code has been moved inside the margin;


• The second warning shows that AllowHtmlTags property is set to False;


• Move your move over the magnifying glass to see that Orders header is highlighted;


• To fix this error simply click on the On button;


• When we go back to report designer we can see that the ugly <B> tags are gone and Orders text is displayed in bold;


• Now we can go to preview tab to see the final result.

The author of the article is Chirag Nirmal and his linkedin profile is
http://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragn