ColdFusion Report Builder has Report Functions

I stumbled on a discussion at: http://www.justskins.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-5171.html that made me realize that Report Functions are available in ColdFusion Report Builder. I had been struggling with the expression builder using iif to conditional show fields. iif is a bear, you have to use DE(" ") and different things and it can be ugly.

As mentioned in the article, you cant use cfml syntax in the expression builder. But you can using report functions. This is a very nice feature. Since I get mad at adobe for that bad things better get happy for the good things. Nice one Adobe!

Coldfusion Report Builder Frustration

In my detail band I want to eliminate the blank lines when a field has no value. I my situation I return a lot # and subdivision and often times there isn't any listed so the line is blank. I don't want a blank line to show up. In Crystal Reports they let you add sections and you can choose to not print the whole section if it is blank anyway.

Coldfusion report builder has an option "Remove Line When Blank" but it flat out does not work for me. Nothing is removed. Whatever the secret combination of options is to make this work, I can't figure it out. C'mon Adobe, we really need this tool, please upgrade and fix it.

Using IIF with ColdFusion Report Builder

I was trying to do some conditional logic in coldfusion report builder and having some problems. Evidently the problem was with my misunderstanding of IIF. I was trying the following:

IIF (len(myvar), myVar, myVar2)

The way IIF works is that it expects strings, indicating variables, which to me is counterintuitive. But the solution that worked was:

IIF (len(myvar), 'myVar', 'MyVar2')

This evaluated to the correct values of those variables and works great.

Inserting a Line Break in ColdFusion Report Builder

I had a field that I wanted to insert a line break. This field needed to be dynamic in it's sizing and it is very possible that it will have to wrap. So It was not an option to just place another field box or textbox below the current one, because if it wrapped and expanded, then the text would flow over the box below.

So I needed a way to force a line break inside the expression builder.

Turns out I just needed to insert a "Chr(10)". More detail: query.fieldname & Chr(10) & ' more text here if you want'

That worked great and now the size of the text in query.fieldname doesn't matter. If it wraps everything is just pushed down, as I wanted.

Displaying the Copyright Symbol &copy in Coldfusion Report Builder

I wanted to display the copyright symbol in coldfusion report builder. We put that at the bottom of each page in our report to state our copyright protection of our content. This took me a while to find, but it is simple. I created a query field and added the following to that field:

chr(169) & ' Copyright 2009 Companyname'

The chr(169) was the trick.