Create a Red Negatives or a Green Bar Report

A Red Negatives report is a report type that shows negative values in red color such that these values meet the requirements set in a conditional expression. A Green Bar report can be similarly created by alternating the background color of a data region like a Table using conditional formatting.

The following steps show how to generate a report with negative values in red negatives.

1. Create a new Page/RDLX report and bind the data to 'reels.db'. See Configure ActiveReports using Config file for more information.

2. In the DataSet dialog that appears, go to the Query page and enter a query in the Query textbox in the following format:

   SELECT AccountsChart.AccountId, AccountsChart.ParentId, AccountsChart.Description, AccountsChart.Rollup, Expenses.ExpenseDate, Sum(Expenses.Amount) AS SumOfAmount
   FROM AccountsChart LEFT JOIN Expenses ON AccountsChart.AccountId=Expenses.AccountID
   GROUP BY AccountsChart.AccountId, AccountsChart.ParentId, AccountsChart.Description, AccountsChart.Rollup, Expenses.ExpenseDate
   ORDER BY Expenses.ExpenseDate, AccountsChart.AccountId;

3. From the Toolbox, drag and drop a Table data region onto the design surface.

4. In the Report Explorer, expand the DataSet node and drag and drop following fields inside the cells of the details row:

   [Description]

   [Rollup]

   [SumOfAmount]

5. In the same table, select any cell (Textbox) that displays integer values, for example [Rollup].

6. In the Properties panel, set the following expression in the Color property:

   
   

   =iif(Fields!Rollup.Value < 0, "Red", "Black")

   type=note

   Note: In general, the expression will be =iif(Fields!FieldName.Value < 0, "Red", "Black") where FieldName refers to field that the textbox contains (of integer type).

7. To avoid repetition of [Description] in detail row, apply detail grouping based on [Description]field. See Detail Grouping for more information.

8. Drag-drop a Textbox control for the report heading.

   
   

   
   

9. Preview the report.

The following image illustrates a report that contains negative values in red:

For a green bar report, click the row handle to the left of the detail row of a Table data region and set the following expression in the BackgroundColor property:

=iif(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "PaleGreen", "White")

On previewing the report, you will notice that every alternate detail the report displays has a green background as depicted by the following image.

Note that with Detail Grouping applied on a table, the background color will not appear as expected.

See Also

Table

Data Binding in Page/RDLX Reports

Demo: Conditional Formatting