A StyleSheet describes how you want your report to look. You can create a StyleSheet within a report request or as a separate file. Either way, it consists of a series of declarations. Each declaration identifies a report component whose characteristics you wish to define (such as a heading, column, or grand total) and describes the desired characteristics of that component.

For HTML reports, you can also use external cascading style sheets and enable internal cascading style sheets. For details, see Cascading Style Sheets.

Unless otherwise noted, all StyleSheet references in this document refer to FOCUS StyleSheets.

Style sheets enable you to create extremely detailed formats for every line, column, or value in your report. In most cases, you will want to use the formatting facilities judiciously to make important information stand out. FOCUS has its own StyleSheets and also supports cascading style sheets for HTML reports, as described in Cascading Style Sheets.

For some types of formatting you can choose between using a style sheet or report syntax. Style sheets enable you to centralize and reuse formatting logic. This provides you with several advantages:

• Productivity. By using just a few lines of code a single style sheet you can format dozens of reports, reducing the development time of each report.
• Easy maintenance. You can change formatting for dozens of reports at one time by editing a single style sheet.
• Consistent appearance. Your enterprise can guarantee a consistent look for its reports by assigning the same style sheets to them.
• Rapid reformatting. You can change the appearance of a report quickly and easily by switching the style sheet assigned to it.
• Prioritizing. You can focus on your first priority report content because you can quickly address report presentation by applying an existing style sheet.

You can apply several formatting techniques to save yourself time and effort. Most of these techniques enable you to use code provided for you by FOCUS, or to leverage code that you write yourself:

• Inheritance and overrides. Each report component inherits attributes from its parent report component. This powerful feature lets you define common formatting in a single declaration for a parent component, and lets descendant components automatically inherit the formatting, while enabling you to override the inherited values when you wish. By designing your StyleSheet to take advantage of inheritance, you can write less code and quickly update formatting for multiple report components.

  For example, if you declare all the report's data to be blue, all data in all columns will be displayed as blue; if you also declare all vertical sort (BY) columns to be orange, this will override the blue for sort columns, which will be displayed as orange; and if you also declare the EMP_ID sort column green, this will override the orange and be displayed as green. For more information, see FOCUS StyleSheet Attribute Inheritance.

• Macros. If you are going to specify the same attribute and value in several declarations in a StyleSheet, you can create a macro that enables you to apply the attribute repeatedly throughout the StyleSheet without coding it each time. Then, if you need to change the value, you can change it once in the macro and have the change applied automatically throughout the StyleSheet.
• Samples. FOCUS comes with several sample StyleSheets, which you can apply to a report. You can also use a sample as a template, first copying it and then customizing the copy.
• Defaults. Many FOCUS StyleSheet attributes have default values. Instead of explicitly specifying every attribute, you can omit some and accept their defaults. For example, you can accept the default font instead of specifying a font. You can find each attribute's default value documented where its syntax is described.

For example, if there are several parts of a report that you wish to emphasize (such as titles of important columns, data values that exceed a threshold, and sort headings), and you want all of these to be bold and purple, you can define a macro that sets font style to bold and color to purple, and then apply the macro to all of these report components.

This report displays the order number, order date, and total order revenue for Century Corporation for the third quarter of 2001:

The report is formatted by a FOCUS StyleSheet and by formatting commands in the report procedure itself. The procedure is shown below, followed by the StyleSheet file, OrderRev:

   TABLE FILE CENTORD 
1.HEADING
1. " " 
1. "C e n t u r y C o r p o r a t I o n" 
1. " " 
1. "Order Revenue - 2001 Q3" 
1. " " 
1. "page <TABPAGENO" 
1. " " 
2. SUM ORDER_DATE/MtDY ORDER_NUM LINEPRICE AS 'Order,Total:'
   BY LOWEST 9 ORDER_DATE NOPRINT
   WHERE (ORDER_DATE GE '2000/10/01') AND (ORDER_DATE LE '2000/12/31'); 
3. ON TABLE SET SQUEEZE ON
4. ON TABLE SET STYLESHEET OrderRev
   ON TABLE HOLD FORMAT PDF
   END

OrderRev Style Sheet

 
5. TYPE=Report, GRID=Off, UNITS=Inches, TOPGAP=0.06, BOTTOMGAP=0.06, $ 
6. TYPE=Data, FONT='Times', $ 
7. TYPE=Data, BACKCOLOR=Aqua, COLOR=Navy,  
7.      WHEN=LinePrice GT 500000, $ 
7. TYPE=Data, COLUMN=LINEPRICE, BACKCOLOR=Aqua, COLOR=Navy, STYLE=Bold, 
7.      WHEN=LinePrice GT 500000, $ 
8. TYPE=Title, FONT='Helvetica', $ 
9. TYPE=Heading, FONT='Helvetica', STYLE=Bold, SIZE=14, JUSTIFY=Center, 
9.                       BACKCOLOR=Dark Turquoise, COLOR=White, $ 
9. TYPE=Heading, LINE=6, BACKCOLOR=White, COLOR=Dark Turquoise, $ 
9. TYPE=Heading, LINE=7, BACKCOLOR=White, $

1. Adds a page heading to the report.
2. Reformats the order date from (for example) 2001/10/03 to Oct. 3, 01.
3. Aligns the heading with the report(tm)s margins instead of the page(tm)s margins.
4. Identifies a StyleSheet file to format the report.
5. Increases spacing between report lines.
6. Uses a proportional serif font for the report(tm)s data.
7. Highlights each order that totals more than $500,000 by applying a navy font and an aqua background, and by bolding the order total.
8. Uses a proportional sans serif font for the report(tm)s column titles.
9. Formats the report(tm)s heading by centering it, applying a larger sans serif font, coloring most of it with a dark turquoise background and white lettering, and applying the inverse coloring to the page number (the sixth line of the heading).

This is only a summary of what these formatting instructions do; you can find complete explanations in the topics that describe each formatting feature.

The formatting logic that you apply to your own reports may be briefer or more extensive than this example, depending on the report and on what formatting you choose to apply.