Description Paul Rogers 2008-03-30 18:05:57 EDT

BIRT reports provide styles. Styles are a great feature for organizing a report's presentation. They are even more handy for ensuring consistency across a group of reports.

However, it is currently rather cumbersome to work with styles. The list of available styles appears only deep in the UI: on the third level of a context menu, in a pull-down on the Style field of the property editor.

This makes it hard to review the styles defined in the report. It is very hard, for example, to scan through the styles to see what fonts are used, or which custom style is used for numbers.

This request is for some kind of explicit style UI at the top level: something like a "style explorer" like the data explorer or library view. This view would:

* List styles alphabetically

* Provide an option to display all styles (including BIRT-defined styles) or only those explicitly defined by the report or library.

* Show where the style is defined (BIRT, library, report). (BIRT-defined for built-in styles; user-defined for custom styles.)

* Provide a description of the style (perhaps as pop-up text).

* Allow the user to apply a style to a report item simply by dragging the style from the style explorer onto the report item.

* When selecting a style, provide an option to highlight all report items that use that style. (Seeing how a style is used is a very quick way to infer the purpose of the style when working on a report that someone else created.)

* Selecting a style shows its properties in a style property editor. This allows one to quickly see which styles do which by scanning down the styles (using the down arrow, say) and noticing which properties are set.

This kind of UI would make the experience of using styles much easier and more intuitive.