Access Cookbook 2nd Edition-Access Cookbook 2nd Edition

Recipe 3.12 Alternate Gray Bars on My Reports

3.12.1 Problem

You have some reports on which you'd like to print alternate rows with gray bars in the background. Printing these bars makes the reports easier to read, especially when there's lots of data or the report is very wide. Is there a way to create these bars in Access?

3.12.2 Solution

There are a number of ways to print alternate rows with gray and white backgrounds. The simplest method is to alternate the background color of the detail section for each new record. This solution shows you how to use this method to achieve the desired effect on your reports.

To create your own reports with alternating gray bars in the detail section, follow these steps:

Create your report. Because this method will fill the entire detail section with gray shading, the effect will work best if your detail section is one line high. (It will work with taller detail sections, but it won't look as good.)
Make sure that every control in the detail section has its BackStyle property set to Transparent. You can quickly change this property for all the controls in the section by marquee-selecting all the controls and then changing the BackStyle property in the properties sheet, which will now have the title Multiple Selection (see Figure 3-28).

Figure 3-28. Changing all the controls' BackStyle properties in one operation

Edit the report's module (click on the Code button on the Report Design toolbar or choose the View Code menu option) and enter the following lines of code in the module's declarations area:
```
' Shade this row or not?
Dim blnShade As Boolean
```

Create an event procedure attached to the OnPrint event property of your report's detail section and add the code that follows. This code must be attached to the OnPrint event property because the Line method for reports will not work when called during the Format event.

Private Sub Detail1_Print(Cancel As Integer, PrintCount As Integer)
    
    ' If all three color components are the same value,
    ' the result will be some shade of gray (ranging
    ' all the way from black (0, 0, 0) to white (255, 255, 255)
    Dim lngGray As Long
    lngGray = RGB(221, 221, 221)
    
    If blnShade Then
        Me.Detail1.BackColor = lngGray
    Else
        Me.Detail1.BackColor = vbWhite
    End If
    
    ' Alternate the value of blnShade
    blnShade = Not blnShade
End Sub

If it matters whether the first row on a page is shaded, create an event procedure attached to the OnPrint property of the report's page header. Replace the False value with True if you want the first row on each page to be shaded.
```
Sub PageHeader0_Print (Cancel As Integer, PrintCount As Integer)
   ' Make sure the first row on the page isn't shaded.
   ' Use True if you want the first row on each page shaded.
   blnShade = False
End Sub
```
Save and print the report. Every other row in the detail section will be printed with a gray background, the same size as the detail section.

Now load 03-12.MDB and open the rptGrayBar report in preview view. This report may not look very good on your screen (it depends on the screen resolution and the color depth of your screen driver), but printed it will look something like the report shown in Figure 3-29. (The exact output will depend on your printer; you may need to modify the color setting for the gray bar to optimize it.)

Figure 3-29. A report with gray bars on alternate rows

3.12.3 Discussion

The code shown in Step 4 relies on a module-level variable, blnShade, that alternates between True and False. If you followed the instructions for Step 5, you set the value of blnShade to a particular value every time you print the page header (before any rows are printed on that page). From then on, every time Access prints the detail section, it decides what to do based on the value in blnShade. What's more, every time it prints the detail section, it alternates the value of blnShade using this line of code:

blnShade = Not blnShade

That is, if blnShade was False, now it will be True, and vice versa.

Once the code has decided whether to shade the section, it sets the background color to the color value of gray or white, based on the value of blnShade, using the following If...Then...Else statement:

If blnShade Then
     Me.Detail1.BackColor = acbcColorGray
   Else
     Me.Detail1.BackColor = vbWhite
End If

We used the built-in VBA constant for white, but there is no constant for gray, so we defined a value corresponding to the color gray earlier in the procedure, using the built-in VBA function, RGB. An easy way to determine the numeric values for colors is by selecting a section or a control in design view and using the color palette to set the desired color. Then you can read the color value off of the properties sheet. Another option is to use vbGreen, which looks good when previewing the report and also results in a pleasing gray color when printed on a black-and-white printer.

[ Team LiB ]