In this part of the article I will slightly examine into a report element called a Databand and see the basic workflow.
For a start you can review the previous part of the article “Reports Designer: a challenge or an opportunity? (Part I)” describing basic SharpShooter Reports capabilities.
This essential band serves for the output of elements placed inside it and is practically one of the key elements of report structure since it formats the report data in a regular way a user is expecting, i.e. the data rows come in vertical direction which is common for most types of reports. As we have already known, the datasource should be added to a DataBand through the datasource property. If you don’t have a datasource specified, then the InstanceCount property can be used. Setting this specific property to some numeric value will let the DataBand output its content the number of times the InstanceCount value says. At first, this sounds a bit ambiguous, but after browsing through the Samples Center for examples on its actual use, the idea behind this becomes transparent. Since we don’t have any actual data, we have to generate it by one of our scripts. This usually comes in handy in some testing cases, but, from my experience, there are a number of situations when this property can help you in solving some particular customizations of data output (for example, printing empty columns).
