A Document Autostyle is a collection of formatting properties saved in a document for various control types (sections, text fields, lines, etc.). Autostyles based on one document can be applied to another document in order to change its formatting or appearance.
Autostyles can be either saved based on an existing document or they can be applied by directly calling an existing document.
When applying an Autostyle to a document, the system copies formatting information from the source document onto the target document. It replaces formatting properties for all sections (such as back color, back style, etc.) and controls (including Grids) on the target document with the corresponding properties in the Autostyle. If there is no corresponding section or control on the Autostyle document, it applies the default format for this control type in the Autostyle. If an Autostyle has multiple controls of the same type in one section, the format of the first control of this type in that section is used.
The exact list of properties that will be copied depends on the type of object. For the most part, this list corresponds to those properties that can be set through the formatting dialog for each type of object. This list is the same set of properties that will be copied from one object to another when using the Paste Formatting command. However, the one exception is Number Formatting, which appears in the formatting dialog for text objects but is not copied as part of the process of applying an autostyle or Paste Formatting.
If the autostyle document has at least one group, then the same group section is found in the autostyle document (by group level, not by name).
Controls
For each control within a subsection, the first control of the same type (text field, image, line, etc.) is found in the corresponding subsection of the autostyle document and all of the formatting properties is copied from that object.
If the corresponding subsection of the autostyle document contains multiple controls of a given object type, then the left-most control of that type is defined as the "first". If there are multiple left-most controls, then Strategy uses the top-most of those controls. If there are still multiple controls that meet this criteria, then the "first" control will be selected arbitrarily from amongst those controls.>
If the corresponding subsection of the autostyle document does not contain any controls of a given object type, then the formatting should be copied from the default control formatting for that object type as stored in the autostyle document.
Grids
Strategy copies all of the container-level formatting properties (borders and background color). The “source” grid object is then checked to see if it has a grid autostyle associated with it. If it does, then Strategy applies that autostyle to the current grid (even if the current grid is not in grid mode). If it does not, then no autostyle is applied to the current grid so none of the formatting of the grid contents will be changed. Strategy does not copy any Graph formatting properties in the Report Services 7.5.0 release.
