One of the requests I got from an earlier version of Drillbridge was to put less space between rows. Fair enough – we all have different stylistic tastes. I could have just changed the spacing and called it a day. But what about other formatting, colors and tweaks? I decided, ya know what would be cool? Styling things however you want.
To that end, there are now a handful of styling options that can be used to achieve any result you want:
- Global CSS
- Report-specific CSS
- Report header
- Report footer
These should be pretty straightforward, but there’s a couple of nuances I want to point out.
Global CSS
Global CSS is a server-wide setting that allows you to define your own Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that will be included in every single report. This is a good place to set some global spacing, fonts, colors, and perhaps some settings inspired by your company colors.
Report-specific CSS
Individual reports can have their own CSS. This useful, for example, if you want/need to adjust things (perhaps a column width or two) for a specific report but not all reports. You might even want to customize settings for different divisions that have different styles (the possibilities are endless!). Additionally, for ease of use reports now have certain CSS classes appended to the data table, rows, and each column, so you can easily apply settings to the 1st, 2nd, 10th, or whatever column specifically. You might want to align some text to the right (text-align: right), for example.
Report Header & Footer
Reports can each have a custom header and footer that is your own custom HTML enclosed within a particular <div> tag at the top and bottom of a report. I thought about making this a global setting but decided against it. You might want to point to some company logo or otherwise include some standard company text or links. There is no limit to what you can put in these areas.
That’s it for these new features – fairly straightforward – but should provide exactly the kind of flexibility that people want, without having to resort to one-off changes in each version of the software.