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Feature request: placeholders like what's available in SSRS

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Ian
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Ian asked on 31 Oct 2014, 11:10 AM
I've been making pretty good use of Telerik reporting over the past couple of months.  The blend of report bands (ala Crystal Reports) and tablix controls (ala SSRS) is useful.

There's one feature that I'm really missing from SSRS though - placeholders.  See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd207048.aspx

It brings two key benefits
1. The ability to easily mix formatting of text within a single textbox.  Thus you could bold a bit of text, and in the same box, have normally formatted text.
2. Building on #1 - the ability to have multiple expressions within a single textbox.


It means that a list of names can be done as
Smith, John
Jones, Allison
Longnamen, Shorty

This natural look is quite appropriate in many listings.  It could be done with string concatenation and HTML formatting but this is much more difficult than just using placeholders like
[surname], [firstname]
as we'd don in SSRS.

The least-friction way to do this in Telerik report is 

Smith,           John
Jones,           Allison
Longnamen, Shorty

where we use two separate textboxes for surname and firstname - this leads to having to gauge how big surnames could be and then have the firstname always far enough over to avoid a collision.

Is this something you might consider for Q1 2015?  I haven't thought about it too heavily but I suspect you could implement it with some work in the designer to allow entry, storage and manipulation of placeholders.  In the rendering engine you could translate this to HTML formatted string concatenation.

Thoughts? :)

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Ian
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answered on 31 Oct 2014, 11:14 AM
Perhaps I've been too quick to judge :)  I was just reading through http://www.telerik.com/help/reporting/report-items-html-text-box.html - I'll explore it a bit and see if it's a good replacement (or even better than what's in SSRS).  I'd still appreciate input on the differences in the approach between Telerik's reporting designer and SSRS's options in this area in case someone else has some best practices or techniques.
Thanks :)
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Nasko
Telerik team
answered on 05 Nov 2014, 08:03 AM
Hello Vernon,

The HtmlTextBox report item allows developers to insert HTML-formatted text into a report. You can specify the HTML value at design time (either through a WYSIWYG editor or through an expression editor), or retrieve it from a data source using any simple or complex expression that evaluates to correctly formatted HTML.
In order to create placeholders we can suggest you to use embedded expressions inside the HtmlTextBox. For more information, please refer to the Embedded Expressions help article.

Please note that the HtmlTextBox item works with text formatting options only. The list of supported HTML tags and CSS attributes can be found here.

Regards,
Nasko
Telerik
 

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Nasko
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