ActiveReports: Customizing Columnar Reports
Section Based Reports in ActiveReports support newspaper column layouts in both the detail and group sections called Columnar Reports. The documentation provides a step by step walkthrough for creating these. Many a times, the users working with Section Reports askif it is possible to get the records rendered on per column basis. The need arises when the layout of the reports is very specific, allowing only a particular number of records displayed in a column of the detail section. In this blog, I would be discussing about a simple approach which allows the developers to decide how many records they want to get rendered per column in their reports. Let us first take a look how our final output will look: 
The implementation includes the following steps:
- Initialize a variable of type integer to count the number of records.
- Increment this variable by 1 in detail's format event as this event fires for every record rendered in the report.
- Apply a condition to check if the value of the variable has reached to the number of records that has to be rendered per column, say 20.
- If so, set the NewColumn property of the detail section to After and reset the variable to 0.
- If this is not the case, set the NewColumn property of the detail section to None.
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