Listview.AutoResizeColumns(ColumnHeaderAutoResizeStyle.HeaderSize) expands last column to fill listview - vb.net

This just started happening in the last week. I'm currently using VS 2012 Professional on Windows 10, coding in VB.NET. I had been successfully using Listview.AutoResizeColumns(ColumnHeaderAutoResizeStyle.HeaderSize) to resize the columns prior to passing the listview to a printing routine. I took a week off the project and when I ran it again the last column started to occupy the remaining balance of the listview width after calling the method, getting rid of what some call the 'ugly' last empty column. So it now pushes that last column off onto another page due to the increased width. It did not do this before. In that week off I did install the VS 2015 Community edition to evaluate.
Has anyone else noticed this? And if so... solution?

Found the problem.
When using Listview.AutoResizeColumns(ColumnHeaderAutoResizeStyle.HeaderSize) it will work as desired by resizing ALL the Columns to the Width of the Header Text ONLY if the ListView's width is less than the total Column widths.
If the ListView's width is wider than the total Column widths, then the LAST Column will then fill the remaining space, which is what I did not want reflected in my printing routine. I was using those Column widths in my printing routine. The problem was those widths, which changed as the ListView's width changed, being passed into the printing routine. Not reliable.
My Work-Around: I simple resized the last Column the 'old fashioned' way after calling .AutoResizeColumns.
Also. I didn't feel the need to post any code, as the one, snarky, condescending comment states, as it was a behavioral problem, not a code problem, and would have only clouded the issue. But thanks for the input 'Visual' Vincent. It really added to the solution!

Related

Change Style of ListBox

In Outlook 2010 I have a UserForm with a ListBox.
This ListBox has 4 columns where I show a list of attachments (the columns "File-Name", "File-Type", "File-Size" and "Target-Directory".
Unfortunately the ListBox is restricted in layout functionality, the user can not adjust the column width at runtime (so I have to specify the width of the columns by design).
Because the file path can be quiet long, I set the width of the last column to 999 Pt.
So my ListBox has a horizontal scrollbar.
I want to have the following layout changes to my ListBox:
Add column headers
Change the alignment of a column to right-aligned
Optional: allow the user to sort the list by any column
Optional: allow the user to sort change the width of any column
Optional: show a grid in the ListBox
For 1. I found some answers that this is very complicated and I should use static labels above the list instead.
This is not possible, because my ListBox can be scrolled horizontally.
Is the ListBox really so restricted or is #1 and #2 possible somehow?
I know that there are foreign components available, but I am not allowed to buy any component.
And my solution should work at my colleagues too, so they would also have to install these components.
I have been experimenting with possible solutions to your problem. I think I have taken the listbox approach as far as it will go so I will share what I have discovered.
I can find nothing on the web to suggest that anyone believes you can have listbox column headers without using property RowSource. To use RowSource, you set it to an Excel range.
I got Outlook to create an Excel workbook and to write some data to it. Unfortunately, I could not find any way of getting an Outlook user form to access an Excel range. The syntax for setting RowSource is:
ListBox1.RowSource = "Emails!A2:D20"
This is not the standard syntax for a range and I have failed to discover any method of extending it to include a workbook name.
Jonah_Hess describes an interesting approach in https://stackoverflow.com/a/43381634/973283. He has two list boxes. One is a one-line listbox that contains the headings and the other contains the data. The two listboxes are set to the same number of columns with the same widths. This gives an attractive appearance but if you scroll the data listbox, the headings listbox does not scroll with it. This is not really any different from placing labels above a single listbox.
I tried putting the headings and the data list boxes in a frame and scrolling the frame but could not get it to work. I have used frames with VB user forms but the functionality is very different so there are no lessons learnt that I could bring to a VBA user form. Perhaps someone more familiar with VBA frames could get this approach to work.
I gave up trying to get a solution in Outlook. An Excel macro can access Outlook data so I tried that approach.
I created a macro-enabled workbook. Within it, I have two forms both of which fill the screen to conceal the worksheet. The first form just says: “Please wait while I load data from Outlook”. I am not clear about the data on your form so I imported selected details from a folder full of junk emails which I wrote to a worksheet. I sized the columns for the list box to match those for the worksheet. The result was:
The text is a little small but I think it is readable. The listbox at the bottom allows me to select emails for different periods. Long ago I had problems with RowSource which meant I could change the values in the range but I could not change the size of the range. I have either managed to avoid that problem today or it was a bug that has been fixed.
You can see that the headings are displayed. The columns are a little wide but I consider them to be a reasonable first approximation. Options to change the widths would be easy to implement.
The changes you ask for:
Add column headers. Done
Change the alignment of a column to right-aligned. Possible but difficult. You would need to pad the text with an appropriate number of leading spaces.
Optional: allow the user to sort the list by any column. The data is in a worksheet so easy.
Optional: allow the user to change the width of any column. I have set the column widths at runtime to show it is possible.
Optional: show a grid in the ListBox. Not possible.
If the above is interesting, I could show you all my code and instruct you on creating the forms so you could duplicate my experiment. Alternately, I could just explain: how I imported the Outlook data to Excel, how I included the column headings and how I set the column widths.
I cannot find anything to suggest that anything better can be achieved with listboxes.
An alternative approach is to use a grid of labels. This can give an attractive appearance and one or more columns could be right-aligned. Using the Controls property of the user form, you can treat the grid as a two-dimensional array. I have used this technique long ago and found it attractive and not particularly difficult.
In order to set the alignment of a specific column to the right, trying the opposite way might help you:
Set TextAlign attribute of the listbox to "3-fmTextAlignRight".
Add spaces at the END of the each data in the column of sourcearray, which you want to align LEFT. The number of added spaces should be so large as to exceed the width of the column in which the data appears. You don't have to mind whether the number fits to the columnwidth (overflown spaces do no harm). You may prefer to use & String(30, " ") instead (30 is just for example) .
If added spaces seem to be wholly ignored (i.e. data appear right-aligned only), further add any single character (such as "_") at the end of the spaces.
This is a cosmetic solution, but works when seeing left-aligned figures is too annoying.
After doing the above, please be careful when selecting from the list (trimming the added spaces, keeping BoundColumn data intact, etc.).
This trick works for both Excel and Outlook (not sure for other applications).
Test result in Outlook VBA (...trailing 50 spaces are added to data in column 1 and 4.)
Hope this helps.

How to avoid data being cut when presenting a BIRT report as PDF?

After exporting report in PDF format I realized that a few rows were hidden. As you can see in the image:
Notice that the 1st row in the second page is not the next row fetched by the data set, which should actually be 10 January 15 03:00.
Also, there's no Page Break, instead the default layout comes from the Master Page which is US letter.
I've been trying different solutions for this problem and after checking
M Williams and James Jenkins suggestions (among others) I still couldn't find it.
Perhaps Dominique could help? Dom?
The large blank space we can see below this table suggests there is a fixed margin or something like that which prevents all rows to be displayed. What is the value of the "Page break interval" property of the table? By default it is 40, try to decrease it until all rows are displayed in PDF. Otherwise you need to find out which element of the report has a fixed height or margin, This blank space might also be due to a property of the master page such margins and footer size

SSRS Report Printing Incorrectly

I am trying to figure out why a row keeps on blowing up during printing. Here is an example: http://imgur.com/OQD9VEh #2 is where it is getting extended. As you can see it happens when the data continues on to the next page. It is because of the columns on the right where the values are "Family" and "Mom". If I remove those two columns, the report prints out fine. Once I add them back in, the last row, no matter the row, expands dramatically if it is the leading row on the next page.
Things that I have already tried which have not worked:
- Disabling the option to have the cells increase or decrease in height.
- Tried increasing the height and width of the tablix
- Altered the data type and size to only 6 char for both columns on the left
Any ideas?
Add a column to the right of your outermost column and set its width to very small with no borders and background color(invisible). This may do the trick.
have you try to have the same row height same as the above.
try to set the row "Can Shrink" to false and "Can Grow" to false

SSRS 2005 with matrix and list shows blank page between every data page when printing or exporting to PDF

I am using SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 - I have created a portrait A4 report 8.5in by 11in.
The report consists of a header, body and a footer.
The body consists of a number of textboxes in a 2 column layout and underneath them a matrix placed onto a list.
The matrix consits of 2 fixed rows (with 1 fixed textual column in the top row and 2 dataset field columns in the bottom one) and a number of columns (each with a width of 0.875in and data taken from different dataset fields). I use the group expression =Ceiling(RowNumber(Nothing)/5) on the list, to make the matrix columns start below the previous ones every 5 repeated columns.
The problem I am facing is that a blank page (with only header and footer) is appearing between every page of report data when I export the report to PDF or print it physically, if the matrix spans more than one page of data. There is plenty of room for the columns of the matrix on the page. I have tried the following, but to no avail:
1) I checked that Page Width (8.5in) >= Body Width (7.20833in) + Left Margin (0) + Right Margin (0)
2) I checked that Page Height (11in) >= Page.TopMargin (0) + Header.Height (2in) + Body.Height (6.60417in) + Footer.Height (0.89583in) + Page.BottomMargin (0)
3) I played around with various margin values, ranging from 0in to 0.5in for the left, right, top and bottom margins.
4) I set all textboxes' CanGrow property to false. This also has the undesirable effect of chopping out the text when it cannot fit, but even so, the blank page problem still occurs.
5) I placed the list and the matrix together in a rectangle with the blank space (to the right of the matrix) outside the rectangle.
The only thing that stops the blank pages from appearing is changing the list grouping expression to =Ceiling(RowNumber(Nothing)/2), i.e. make the matrix start a new "table" every 2 repeated columns (rather than 5). This, however, I do not understand, as there is plenty of space for 3 other columns to their right and it is odd and untidy to just put 2!!
I would greatly appreciate any help in this!
Thanks in advance!
Tim
For anybody who is having a similar problem in SSRS 2008, I found the only way to fix this was to set the property named ConsumeContainerWhitespace on the Report itself to true.
In my case the issue was that the matrix on the page was narrow in design mode with a lot of whitespace to the right. When rendered, the matrix was rendered much wider (due to the data) but the renderer would also include the whitespace, causing the report to be much wider than the actual page.
If you set this property, the extra whitespace does not get rendered.
If I understand you correctly I've solved this problem before. The matrix claims extra white space, the solution I used is as follows:
You need to consume the white space.
[-------page width------]
[matrix][-textbox hack-]
I think you can set the textbox to be invisible
Note: When I attempted this in 2005, it only worked when the invisible textbox spanned the entire line.

Eliminate stray whitespace between textboxes on a report

I have 4 stacked textboxes in the body of an SSRS report and am getting a stray space / extra line between textboxes 3 & 4.
This is for an address block - name / title / email / website. Can't put it in a single textbox with intervening vbcrlf tokens because the email and website are links. I've tried formatting it to remove vertical spacing; also calculated the exact position by taking top + height to calculate the position. And of course I've tried positioning it so there are exactly 0 pixels between the text boxes. If I reverse the position of #3 & #4 the rendering looks the same so it isn't stray formatting characters in the data fields.
The solution is to wrap the stacked boxes in a rectangle.
I had this problem as well. It blew my mind until I started over on another part of the form. The new boxes worked perfectly until I moved them to the right of another set of text boxes which had some word wrap in them. I realized the wordwrapped boxes were directly related to the gaps I was seeing the set of textboxes to the right. I guess there's some kind of poor markup going on that tries to line things up horizontally and enclosing the set of textboxes in a rectangle protects them from it.
good idea on putting the info into a table - jumping off that idea - I'm going to construct a dynamic string in my query and output the dynamic string into a textbox. thank you for the idea, I don't know why I didn't think to do that.
Simpler thing is to just check text alignment - the default is "default" which appears to be centered. Changing the text box to the right to "left" fixed this problem for me.
Reduce padding property of the textbox.
Once dragging the textbox one closer to the other the tooltip shows convergence points between two textboxes - make tooltip show 0 points
it is best I could do to control the spacing