Oracle SQL*Plus: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Master/Detail Reports in HTML

The last HTML reporting challenge that I want to talk about is that of generating master/detail reports such as the Project Hours and Dollars Detail report generated by Example 5-8. For these reports, you cannot avoid the use of TTITLE. You do want to define a header that repeats throughout the report because you need a way to indicate when the master record changes.

Example 6-8 recreates the Project Hours and Dollars Detail report in HTML form. Figure 6-5 shows the result, and as you probably expect by now, Example 6-9 shows the CSS stylesheet used to produce the layout that you see in the figure. Pay particular attention to the following aspects of this report example:

• The page heading, the one that occurs once at the top of the HTML page, is written to the HTML stream using PROMPT commands, just as in Example 6-6. PROMPT commands also write the <div> tags.

• TTITLE is used to specify the line that prints for each new master record. This line is written out as a level-3 heading using the <h3> tag. (Unfortunately, it's written into the leftmost cell of a three-column table.)

• Similar to what was done in the previous section, the <div> containing the page title is formatted as white text on black, while the <div> containing the report detail is formatted as black text on light gray.

• To distinguish the detail lines from the master lines, the detail table has been indented a bit and it has been given a white background. See the table.detail style in Example ...