Hi again,

I've been busily styling all our reports and I found that quite a bit of my time gets consumed by determining what column number in the table output I'm looking at, so that I can apply styling to particular columns. It would be really great if there were some way to print the column numbers above or under the titles!

It gets especially confusing if you're trying to apply conditional formatting to a across-columns, as you can reference the across-column with ACROSSCOLUMN=N3, but you need to reference the actual column in the WHEN=N10 LT 0 clause!

An example would probably clarify what I mean here;

Say you have:

TABLE FILE MY_TABLE_FILE
SUM
     BUDGET/D10S
     COST/D10S NOPRINT
     DEMAND/D10S
     STOCK/D10S
BY GROUP
BY ARTICLE
BY DIVISION
SUM
     BUDGET/D10S
     COST/D10S NOPRINT
     DEMAND/D10S
     STOCK/D10S
BY GROUP
BY ARTICLE
BY DIVISION
ACROSS YEAR
ACROSS MONTH
END

That gives output like:

                                           YEAR
                                           2010
                                           MONTH
                                           1                   2                   3
GROUP ARTICLE DIVISION BUDGET DEMAND STOCK BUDGET DEMAND STOCK BUDGET DEMAND STOCK BUDGET DEMAND STOCK

Now if I could get the below under or above that row of titles, that would be really helpful:

N1    N2      N3       N4     N6     N7    N8     N10    N11   N8     N10    N11   N8     N10    N11    (columns)
                                           N1     N3     N4    N1     N3     N4    N1     N3     N4     (across)

The fact that I'm not even sure about the above numbering being correct only underlines why it'd be helpful
It appears that in newer versions of WebFOCUS we'd be able to reference across-columns in the WHEN clause using A1, A3, etc, but even with that, the above seems really useful to me.

[Edit: Someone marked this as SOLVED - I wonder why?]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Wep5622,

Thats why I always replace column number in stylesheet with column name. It also doesnt go wrong when you add a column.

That's nice and all, but the Report Editor generates numbers and you can't use column names for across columns. I've tried and seen that it results in odd behaviour and I recall coming across this in the documentation too.

So there is reason to use column numbers and therefore there is reason to want some method for figuring out what column number corresponds to what table column in the results.

Come to think of it, the same could be said for a mapping of column numbers to field names, as those can be quite different from how they are printed in the output; they can be in a different order or aliased, after all. That's especially useful on DB2/400 where column names are limited to 8 characters and field descriptions (thanks for those) are printed instead - it's not always easy to figure out what database column corresponds to the column title.