Report Units of Measurement

• Nov 14, 2024
• 3 minutes to read

This article describes the different measurement systems—Imperial, Metric, and Screen coordinates—that can be used in reporting to maintain uniformity in element locations, dimensions, and margins. This help topic includes details on how to assign these measurement units within reports and the properties affected by the chosen system.

Supported Systems of Measurement

Most metrics of report elements can be expressed in units that correspond to one of the following systems of measurement:

• Imperial system (in hundredths of an inch)

  This is the default system that is assigned to each new report, as well as to controls that have been created in code, but have not yet been added to a report (in this case, the XRControl.RootReport property of these controls returns null in C# or Nothing in Visual Basic).

• Metric system (in tenths of a millimeter)
• Screen coordinates (in pixels)

To assign a system of measurements to a report, use its XtraReport.ReportUnit property.

Alternatively, you can use the Report Designer Options Dialog:

A change in measurement system converts the corresponding property values and updates the layout of all report elements in the Report Designer. Notably, the measurement system determines the minimum increment with which an element’s location and size can be changed, which is specified by the XtraReport.SnapGridSize property.

When you specify a control’s dimensions in code, make sure that these values agree with the measurement units that are currently assigned to the report.

Display Element Size during Resize Operations (Dimension Notations)

You can use the UserDesignerOptions.ShowDimensionNotations setting to control whether to display exact element size while resizing. The notation are based on a selected report unit:

System of Measurement	Displayed Unit	Image
Imperial system	inches
Metric system	millimeters
Screen coordinates	pixels

Alternatively, use the Dimension Notation option in the View tab to control dimension notations visibility:

For Web Report Designer, use the DimensionNotationsEnabled setting.

Affected Properties

To maintain a high standard of printing, the border width of an element is always measured in pixels, which only applies to the XRControl.BorderWidth and XRZipCode.SegmentWidth property values. When publishing a report, these values are converted to its unit of measurement based on the control’s Dpi property value.

The values of the following properties are expressed in the measurement units assigned to the XtraReport.ReportUnit property.

Properties	Description
XtraReport.SnapGridSize	Determines the scale of the snap grid, which allows you to easily align elements in a Report Designer.
XRControl.BoundsF	Specifies both the dimensions and location of an element.
XRControl.SizeF XRControl.HeightF XRControl.WidthF	Specify an element’s dimensions.
XRControl.LocationF XRControl.BottomF XRControl.LeftF XRControl.RightF XRControl.TopF	Specify an element’s location.
XtraReport.PageHeight XtraReport.PageWidth	Specify the dimensions of report pages.
XtraReport.Margins	Specifies the page margins of a report.
MultiColumn.ColumnWidth MultiColumn.ColumnSpacing	Specify the width of report columns and the spacing between them.
XRShape.LineWidth	Specify the Shape control’s line width.
XRBarCode.Module	Specifies the width of the narrowest module (a bar or white space) in a bar code.
XRCrossBandControl.StartPointF XRCrossBandControl.EndPointF	Specify the start and end coordinates of a cross-band control.