Don’t worry about Your Web Report Studio Style When Including a Stored Process

This post was kindly contributed by Business Intelligence Notes for SAS® BI Users - go there to comment and to read the full post.

When you need to add or link a stored process to your Web Report Studio report, you might be worried that it will not look the same. For instance – here’s a simple stored process that I created where I declare the style as Banker. [You can also use a SAS supplied shared prompt]. Notice how Banker looks anything except what a banker or bank would be like? I’m just saying.

You ever wonder what would happen to Web Report Studio if you added this stored process [See Add the stored process to Web Report Studio post] since you have defined how you want the style to look. For instance, Web Report Studio provides four different styles – none of which are Banker.

Selecting a Web Report Studio Style

There are four basic styles that you can select as a default for your report. There is very little difference between the styles other than color, but I’ve taken a screenshot of each for your comparison. Learn to build your own custom style in this post. If you want to change a color temporarily, then use the Properties for the data object or change the template colors.

Plateau – Compact with Blues and Orange Highlight

This style uses blues and grays with a highlight of orange. It reminds me of the SASWEB style. This style uses smaller fonts and less spacing. For instance, notice that the 0% line on the graph lines up with the Hotel category in the cross tab object. If you look forward at the other styles, notice that same line aligns with the Media category. This is due to the amount of space between the objects – which you can also compare.

Meadow – Earthy Colors

This is an earthy color panel with greens and browns. The line for the graph barely has any contrast. As I was noting in the last paragraph, see how much more space exists between the items in the rows.

Seaside – Water and Sand Comes to Mind

This style is very similar to Plateau but gold/soft cream is used where gray is used in the other. Notice the blue line around the cross tab object. The color contract between the blue and gold make it stand out more than the others.

Festival – Party Colors!

Festive is a good word for this style due to its bright colors! As I was noting about the style above, the contrast of purple and yellow is a little too much on the cross tab object and the graph; however. Then again – I’m not a purple fan so if it were pink I might be commenting on how lovely it is. 🙂

Changing a Web Report Studio Style

To change the style for your current report, do this. If you compare the Plateau screen captures with the others – notice how my special formatting for the titles (Incidents by Business Type, Sub Category Arrest Counts) were lost. When you change the style this is one of the changes that you can lose. You will receive a warning before you change the style. The warning sounds like the world will end – what they mean is you have to redo some formatting..

If you want to change the style for all reports you build, change the Preferences. At the top left of the window, select Preferences. In the Preference pop-up window, select Report Creation > Report Style. The style you set here will apply to future reports you create.

Adding a Stored Process

So what does happen when I add the above stored process to the report? Since the style is assigned with the %Let _ODSStyle variable …. nothing. SAS overrides the value and applies the style from the report. So it kept the value for the Title – but certainly not the look. I had Meadow as the default style and Web Report Studio overrode the stored process settings to use Meadow.

I was curious what would happen if I had used shared style prompt and attempted to set it. Well – no dice. Web Report Studio was not having any of that – looks like it threw out the stored process. It did this even if I selected the defined style. I don’t think this is an error; looks like it “works as designed”. Nine out of ten times the user wants the stored process to match the report not a crazy style set by an unstable developer.

So – I think you need to create a custom style if you have your heart set on Banker for your web report.