Modifying the Standard Section

By default, the reports in Spira typically have an XHTML table that is used to display a report of tabular data:

<table class="DataGrid" style="width:100%">
      <tr>
        <th>Req #</th>
        <th>Name</th>
        <th>Type</th>
        <th>Status</th>
        <th>Release #</th>
        <th>Test Traceability</th>
        <th>Requirements Traceability</th>
      </tr>

....
rest of table

when this is rendered as an Acrobat PDF table, each of the cells will be same, standard width.

If you want to specify a specific table width, you cannot use standard HTML attributes on the <td> or <th> tags such as:

  • style="width: 200px"
  • width="200"

because these are not supported by other formats such as XSL-FO which is the markup language used to generate the PDF format files.

Instead, you need to use the special <colgroup> and <col> column and column group XHTML syntax. This lets you specify the width of the columns without needing to adjust each cell in the table. For example you could use:

<table class="DataGrid" style="width:100%">
   <colgroup>
     <col width="20px" />
     <col width="100px" />
     <col width="200px" />
   </colgroup>
   <tr>
      <th>Req #</th>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Type</th>
      <th>Status</th>
      <th>Release #</th>
      <th>Test Traceability</th>
      <th>Requirements Traceability</th>
   </tr>

....
rest of table

That will display correctly in HTML and PDF formats, with different width cells.