BI Publisher: How to format a specific column conditionally.

When I was going through a tech forum, this question got my attention.  

"How to format(bold, color,underline etc) specific column conditionally.

Say you have XML data, based on certain flag value, data should be displayed in a special format.

See the actual question here.

How to Underline a column with a specific width

Here is the answer..

I created this test scenario at my end and it works for me.

Consider following data as my XML data file..

=====XML data begins. =====

1

abc

12,000.00

Y

2

def

13,000.00

N

3

ghi

14,000.00

N

=====XML data ends. =====

And the way I worked is as follows..

Following statement is the key in this solution

--

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1. Create two IF conditions in your template.

- one Y 

- another one for N

2. Inside your IF under_line= Y region, use this font underline statement

3. Inside your IF under_line= N region, use simple amount display field. i.e

For your other requirements..

a. Underline must be of 13 characters length.. do PADding with spaces in your data source itself. So when it come to XML file, your amount column will comes with full 13 characters. 

ex: I did LPAD to my data. LPAD(amount,13,' ' )

b. For amount formats(ex: $12,345.60), try this in XML publisher template, else workout this also as a part of your XML data source(i.e Oracle Reports, or any..).    

Complete code can be downloaded here..  

In the same way you can do lot of other font formats like

etc..

Happy surfing.