Reusing CSS styles
Most organizations maintain web sites, and most of the web pages on these sites use CSS to define the look and feel of the pages. As a report designer, you can reuse the styles from CSS files. The benefits of reusing styles are obvious—you save time by not having to reinvent the styles, and your reports reflect the standard style. You can reuse CSS styles in two ways:
Import the styles into your reports.
When you import styles from a CSS file, BIRT Report Designer copies the styles to the report. Subsequent changes to styles in the CSS file have no effect on the imported styles in the report.
Link the CSS file to your reports.
When you link a CSS file to the report, any changes made to the CSS file are reflected in the report.
Import styles if you expect the styles in the original CSS file to change, but you do not want the report to use the future style changes. If you do not have any control over the original CSS file, extensive style changes in the file, such as font sizes, line spacing, or text alignment, can alter a precisely designed report in undesirable ways.
Link a CSS file to your report if you are the author of the CSS file, and you want to maintain and update the styles in all your reports by modifying a single CSS file.
BIRT Report Designer supports the CSS2 specification. Not all CSS2 properties, however, are supported. For a list of unsupported properties, see the Style and CSS specification document, which is available at the following URL:
http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/ref
Styles that use unsupported properties are available to a report. The unsupported properties, however, do not have an effect when applied to a report element.
Importing styles
You can import any number of styles from a CSS file. If you import a style whose name matches the name of an existing style in the report, BIRT Report Designer appends a number to the name of the imported style. For example, if a report contains a style named TopLevelHeading, and you import a style with the same name, the imported style’s name changes to TopLevelHeading1.
Imported styles appear in the list of available styles with all the styles that are created with BIRT Report Designer. You apply an imported style to a report element, edit the style’s properties, or delete it in the same way that you do with a style that was created using BIRT Report Designer.