In general, QuickReportz creates report columns automatically, but sometimes it is necessary to customize what is automatically created.
The "standard" report column type is used to define custom formatting options on report data values.
In the following example we are creating a list of authors with birth dates and links to search bing (the bing link column is discussed in more detail here)
The birth date column needs to be formatted so that the date is shown in a more formatted/compact manner such as simply July 4th, 1990 without the time and time zone information. This can be accomplished by either modifying the data source query and formatting it within SQL or you can define a custom "standard" column to provide formatting options.
For reference, this is the query used to generate the above report grid.
In the report editor add a "standard" column :
And define the parameters in the column detail popup:
- Datasource Field Name
- The column name defined in the data source query in which you want to customize
- In the example we want to customize the "BirthDate" column as defined in query
- Friendly Name
- Change the column header name to the supplied value (of course you could also just change it in the data source query)
- In the example we want to add a space in the column name so "BirthDate" is shown as "Birth Date"
- Is Visible
- Determines whether the column is visible (sometimes you may choose to make a column invisible but still use it in a calculation)
- Data Format String
- Allows an almost infinite list of formatting possibilities. The formatting syntax is built on Microsoft string formatter and can be used as reference.
- In the example we using the formatting codes to specify a short date string
