GRW – Red Box

I was recently undertaking some Professional Services and creating a report using Genero Report Writer, and was puzzled by a mysterious red box that was appearing in my report.  After some digging what I learnt was that when the environment variable GREDEBUG is greater than 0, if you have a report object that overflows its parent container, it will be rendered with a red background.  This is to highlight something that should be reviewed before the report goes into production.

To see this in action with the OrderReport demo shipped with Genero Studio is very easy.  In your environment, set the environment variable GREDEBUG to 1 or greater, I suggest 3 because you will also get a helpful warning message as well.  In OrderReport.4rp find the WordBox that is resposible for rendering the text “Customer Order”, it has the name CustOrderTitle, and set the X-Size property to 20cm.  This will make this report object wider than its parent container (and the page).  Now run the report, what you should see is the word “Customer Order” rendered with a red background …