Editing General Properties

The following properties are common to all elements being edited:

These properties include X and Y coordinates of the top left corner of the element’s bounding rectangle (in points) and the width and height of the element’s bounding rectangle (in points). Note that each point is 1/72 of an inch. You can use the rulers and grid to help you understand where the left top corner of the element’s bounding rectangle is.

These properties determine fill and outline properties of the element. Note that for some elements the fill properties are not applicable (for example, for lines) whereas for others – the outline properties are not applicable (for example, for sub-reports). The following options may be specified:

Tick this box if you want the element to be filled with a particular color (if applicable). You must also select the color by pressing the Edit button and choosing the color in the Color Dialog. Note also that for text and tag elements this color is the background color of the text

Tick this box to specify the line color of an element (for rectangles an outline will be drawn around the rectangle; for text and tag elements this is the foreground color of the text). You must also select the color by pressing the Edit button and choosing the color in the Color Dialog. Note also that for text and tag elements this color is the foreground color of the text.

Select whether the line is solid or dotted (if applicable).

Select the width of the line in points (if applicable).

There are three possible values for this property:

1. Float. When this value is selected the element floats in its parent section if it is pushed downward by other elements found above it. It tries to conserve the distance between it and the neighboring elements placed immediately above it.
2. Fixed relative to top. When this value is selected the report element simply ignores what happens to the other section elements and tries to conserve the y offset measured from the top of its parent report band.
3. Fixed relative to bottom. If the height of the parent report band is affected by elements that stretch, the current element tries to conserve the original distance between its bottom margin and the bottom of the band.

You can optionally specify the name of the element. The name can be used to find an element in the design – see Finding Design Element. It can also be used by the report scriptlets (see Setting System Calculation Properties).

This property is only available for tag, line and rectangle elements. Tick this box if you want the element to automatically stretch downwards to make sure that all its contents are visible at run time. For example, you could define a tag element that refers to an attribute of a business object. At run time when the tag contents are replaced with the attribute value it is possible that the value occupies more space than the height of the tag element (for example, if the value represents a multi-line text). Ticking this box will make sure that the value is always visible no matter how high it is; otherwise only part of the text that fits into the original bounding rectangle of the element will be shown in the resulting document.

<callout type=“primary” icon=“true” title=“note”>stretchable is not available when the Report Layout is set to horizontal </callout>