We have looked at very specific elements of Report Design
elements, such as how to change the font for a Data item, change the background
color for a cell, etc.
This is fine if you don't mind formatting every element in a report manually, though,
this can become bothersome in larger reports. Imagine having a large report with
lots of elements, and having to settle on either the default visual properties (which
are very plain as we have seen), or having to manually edit the properties for each
component. This can become time consuming. Libraries can help by allowing a
developer to store commonly used elements, such as headers (which are already
formatted) for later use. However, there is a much more efficient way to format
reports, by using Style Sheets.
The goal of this chapter is to look at how BIRT uses Style Sheets in Report Designs,
and how Styles can be grouped in a Library to create Themes. This will allow you to
have certain sets of Styles ready for use any time you develop a report, so that you
(as a report developer) can focus strictly on the technical aspects of the report and do
not have to worry about the tedious task of visual presentation.
We will also look at Templates in this chapter. Templates are existing report layouts
that can be used as a starting point for new reports. This is useful if you use a
similar layout in all your reports; you can create a Template and build from that
for each new report.
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