Hello there,

I'm relatively new to webfocus and I'm having trouble finding an answer to a question I have. I've been tasked to apply branding to our Webfocus reports and HTML forms. I realise that's a rather wide topic, but seeing I have only cursory knowledge about this topic in regard to Webfocus I have to ask... I'm probably not the first to ask, branding is a pretty common task, isn't it?
I've been a webdeveloper the past 9 years, so I'm quite familiar with HTML and CSS. That's not what I'm asking about here.

The issue at hand is that we have a plethora of reports and forms that until now have each been styled by hand to sort of match the company styling. Of course, in practice it rarely does. We have reports generating HTML, PDF and Excel output, which all require different styling. My current task is to centralize all that styling. I'm inquiring about how best to go about this.

Ideally, there'd be very little work involved to convert our existing files to use the new approach to branding, I fear that will in fact be the brunt of my task.
And ideally users who create new reports and forms shouldn't need to worry about styling at all from now on; they'd just select a suitable output format (HTML, PDF or Excel), and the rest would be automatic.

Is this possible? And if so, how?

Regards.

Wep,

Welcome to the world of WebFOCUS. You will never want to look back!

First, please pdate your signature so that we know about your environment: very useful when providing answers.

Concerning your question. What one does is for the person responsible for WebFOCUS output - let's call him RA (the Report Administrator) - to define a style for all reports which can then be -INCLUDEd into all reports. The style would take into account output differences (HTML, PDF, EXCEL and so on) using DIALOG MANAGER parameters and provide for fonts, colors, position etc.

The RA can also provide general HEADINGs and FOOTINGs which would also be -INCLUDEd.

There will also be many instances where some generic code can be useful to developers and be kept and updated separately.

I suggest you read up on styling and Dialog Manager and if there are questions put them to us.

First - welcome to WebFOCUS.

Several years ago, I was developing some reports for a financial services client that had a standards document (and a library of code that exemplified the standards). The standards identified fonts, colors, logos, etc. It can be done but it takes some work to get everyone singing from the same hymnal so to speak.

Best wishes.

quote:

Originally posted by Danny-SRL:
Concerning your question. What one does is for the person responsible for WebFOCUS output - let's call him RA (the Report Administrator) - to define a style for all reports which can then be -INCLUDEd into all reports. The style would take into account output differences (HTML, PDF, EXCEL and so on) using DIALOG MANAGER parameters and provide for fonts, colors, position etc.

The RA can also provide general HEADINGs and FOOTINGs which would also be -INCLUDEd.

Included? I was kind of hoping for an approach that doesn't involve the users so much. I can see how various files (reports and HTML forms alike) are generated from "something" that I haven't been able to put my finger on yet. I'd much rather alter whatever those are generated from to automatically include the brand styles than having to rely on users (many aren't even proper developers) to go and include all the right files... That's just bound to go wrong over time.
Of course that wouldn't help me much if those files get updated with the next release of Developer Studio or something.

Is that at all possible? If not, I guess here's a feature request

I already found some options in DS for a Default Style sheet (the .sty type) and a Default Template. We're already using a default style sheet, so that's probably what I need to extend for our reports (it leaves way too much work to the report authors).
However, there doesn't seem to be something for a default cascading style-sheet to include (a reference to) in HTML forms and HTML reports. Or does the "Default Template" provide the means to do that? If so, where do I find those templates? So far I found a few very bare .ftp files in my bin directory, but I'm probably not supposed to alter those?

I think one of our misconceptions is that we expect to be able to put all our branding stuff on the reporting server (in a 'General' project folder). It's starting to look like we'll need to prepare some central web/file-server for logo's, CSS-files, etc as we can't always seem to reference them otherwise. Am I right?

quote:

I suggest you read up on styling and Dialog Manager and if there are questions put them to us.

Well, of course I did read what documentation I could find. I re-read the parts about the Dialogue Manager, but I'm not sure which part you were referring to? I think I must be reading the wrong documentation...

A use case by someone who has already done something similar would be brilliant.

Here's one idea. Whenever a user runs a report from a menu, they must select an output type (HTML, EXL2K, PDF, etc). That choice can be stored in a Dialogue Manager variable (&OUTFMT in the example below). This variable can then be used to call a specific style sheet tailored to the selected output type. In this example, the pre-defined style sheets would be named HTML.STY, EXL2K.STY, and PDF.STY.

-DEFAULTS &OUTFMT = 'HTML'

TABLE FILE <filename>
 PRINT/SUM <column names>
 BY <column name>
 .
 .
 .
 ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT &OUTFMT
 ON TABLE SET STYLESHEET &OUTFMT
END

EDIT: Or, if you are not using menus, you can prompt for the output type and use it to select a style sheet:

TABLE FILE <filename>
 PRINT/SUM <column names>
 BY <column name>
 .
 .
 .
 ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT &OUTFMT.(<HTML,HTML>,<PDF,PDF>,<Excel,EXL2K>).Select type of display output.
 ON TABLE SET STYLESHEET &OUTFMT
END
  

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dan Satchell,

There seems a bit of confusion going on about who my users are - they are "report authors". They are sometimes also "report users", as some of the reports I have to apply branding to are created by the same people who need them.

Some of those people are just barely managing to create a report that gives them the output they need. Having to include company style files is added complexity; they're just not going to do that reliably. Whether they don't know how or they don't care to, the result is the same.
That won't do of course, so my task is to make it as easy as possible for them. I'm trying to figure out how though.

We can have our admins set up Dev Studio with a specific style file pre-configured, but that can be only one style file (there's only a single field in the options panel), so if that's the way to go about this then that one file will have to be able to apply all the styling we need.

I don't think we can apply CSS for HTML output at that point? The style definition seems to be past the point where CSS files can be referenced?
And... do they have to be "external"? The report options panel only seems to provide a field where people can enter an external URL; that seems to make them a little hard to select, a dropdown or a browse button would be preferable in our case as they're defined under HTML files in a general WF project, so they're available to Dev Studio.

As I said before, I'd much rather modify the base templates that new reports and htmlforms are generated from if only I could find them, that approach seems more reliable to me. Is that possible?

Another possibility for reports; I noticed the 'Output Format' dropdown in the Report Painter - is there any way we can influence what's in there? If we could reduce the set of available formats and include appropriate style files in the format definitions that are listed in there, that would make my work a lot easier.

quote:

Originally posted by Wep5622:
We can have our admins set up Dev Studio with a specific style file pre-configured, but that can be only one style file (there's only a single field in the options panel), so if that's the way to go about this then that one file will have to be able to apply all the styling we need.

I don't think we can apply CSS for HTML output at that point? The style definition seems to be past the point where CSS files can be referenced?

I figured out how to use .FTP files for this. I created 'company.ftp' as a hand-edited file in our 'General' webfocus project directory and referenced it in the Dev Studio options (we have the webfocus directory mounted as a samba mount-point). That seems to work!

The file ('company.ftp') looks like:

TABLE FILE %s
ON TABLE SET HTMLCSS ON
ON TABLE SET CSSURL 'http://company-server/company.css'
ON TABLE SET STYLE *
     INCLUDE = company,
$
ENDSTYLE
END

The report painter still adds some superfluous styles after the include, but they don't appear to be conflicting with our company style definitions, so I guess it's alright.

Ok, final question about this for the time being:

How do I standardize the styling of new launch pages?

I can see that a HTMLFORM with some standard HTML gets generated by Dev Studio; how can I influence that so that our standard CSS file gets included? Or, if that's not possible, at least some style defaults for the body (background-color, font-family, etc)?