Detail cell spanning multiple rows

Posted earlier in the BIRT newsgroup but it doesn't look I'll get any replies there. Now seeing my post on this forum in newsgroup mirror I can understand why. My formatting with spaces is all mangled and unintelligible. Let me try again with underscores instead.

Is there a property that allows detail cell to span over multiple detail rows?

I have report that has long text in one column. That text repeats in subsequent rows. I can use "suppress duplicate" feature to show this text only once and end result looks like this:

This is very,_______100__200__300
very, very,
long text
_________________200__300__400
_________________300__400__500
_________________400__500__600

I would prefer that first cell spans for as many rows as there are, so report looks like this:

This is very,_______100__200__300
very, very,________200__300__400
long text__________300__400__500
_________________400__500__600

I tried setting "Drop" property in designer, but it doesn't look like it's doing anything. Any ideas?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

mwilliams

Hi predrag,

I don't know that there's a feature currently in BIRT that will allow for that. I'd have to check it out. What version of BIRT are you using? You could possibly try using substrings to portion out the string over several lines.

bhanley

Can you post your design and data? I think you may need to nest one table inside another to get the behavior you are looking for. Seeing the design and ideally the data will help a lot in getting this worked out.

predrag

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="mwilliams">What version of BIRT are you using? You could possibly try using substrings to portion out the string over several lines.</blockquote>
 
Using v2.3.1. I'm sure I can come up with manual way of doing it. I was just hoping someone may know shortcut.

mwilliams

predrag,

Here's an example report that shows how to do this with the nested table solution offered by bhanley. Maybe this will help you out. I made this in BIRT 2.3.1.

predrag

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="bhanley">Can you post your design and data? I think you may need to nest one table inside another to get the behavior you are looking for. Seeing the design and ideally the data will help a lot in getting this worked out.</blockquote>
 
Sure. It's simple to come up with example. See attached file. You may have to change location of CSV file in report.rptdesign for your environment. 
 
As i noted above i was hoping there's ready-made solution where I can just set appropriate option.

aliqs

I am just a newbie, but isn't what you're asking in the Property Editor - Cell, Properties tab, Advanced, "Rowspan" property?