Defining Report Designer Settings

To define Report Designer Settings, click on the Settings button on the Report Designer toolbar. If you don't see it there, check the burger menu of the toolbar, There are several groups of Settings - General Settings, Text Settings and Grid Settings. Note that the Grid settings can be directly navigated to if you right-click on the button that toggles grid on or off on the toolbar.

When you click on the Settings button in the toolbar, the Settings Dialog is displayed. You can switch between panels of the dialog to edit a particular group of settings. Changes to the settings are stored in a special file, so they persist between sessions. To restore settings to factory default, click on the Restore button located next to the OK and Cancel buttons of the dialog. The following settings can be defined:

If this switch is on, graphical elements, such as rectangles and circles, as well as text and tag expressions, are created with the transparency flag on by default. This flag can then be turned off in the Property window of an individual element. If an element is transparent, it does not have a background color, and the uses can “see through” the element.

This setting is enabled only when the previous setting is off and graphical elements, such as rectangles and circles, as well as text and tag expressions, are created non-transparent. This setting lets you select a default background color of new elements.

This setting lets you select a default outline color of new elements that support outline color.

If this switch is on, the Report Designer shows tooltips for tag expressions (dynamic text elements) that do not fit the bounding box of the element. The text of the expression is shown truncated in the design area. The tooltip will then show the full text of the expression. Tooltips will also be shown for all conditional elements - the tooltip will show the full text of conditional expressions.

Determine how far you can zoom out and in

Names of the report bands are displayed as watermarks in the design area. This setting allows you to specify font size of the watermark.

This setting allows you to specify the color of the markers which are displayed when an element is selected

This setting controls how much an element is shifted by relative to the original element. This refers to the scenario when you want to duplicate an element by copying it to the clipboard and pasting on top of the original element.

This setting controls how much an element is moved by when the user “nudges” the selected element by pressing the arrow keys. The higher the nudge factor the more the element moves with each press of the arrow key.

This setting toggles display of rulers on or off. Note that this can also be done by clicking on the Ruler button on the Report Designer toolbar.

When the height of a band becomes smaller than this value it is displayed by a special box with the name of the band displayed inside this box, rather than a divider line and a watermark.

All settings in this group refer to how a new text elements (static or dynamic) are created by default. You can specify text color, font family, font size, line spacing, vertical and horizontal alignment.

Settings in this group allow you to specify properties of the grid. You can navigate to these settings directly if you right click on the button that toggles grid on and off. The following settings can be specified:

This setting toggles display of the grid on or off. Note that the same can be achieved by clicking on the grid toggle button on the toolbar of the Report Designer