Apex 4.2.1: Region table layout and pagination

Question

See https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=57688:2
Theme 24, table-based layout. Page template = One Level Tabs, Left Sidebar.
All 4 regions are report regions using the report region and 2-column portlet as the region and report templates respectively.
Regions 1.1 and 1.2 are supposed to be in the same row in different columns so 1.1 has New Grid=Yes and 1.2 has New Column=Yes. Ditto for 2.1 and 2.2
1. Trial and error shows that simply changing the Pagination of report region 1.1 from None to Bottom-Right causes the layout to shift such that 1.2 moves to a grid row by itself! What is going on here? Surely a "trivial" change like whether pagination is displayed or not shouldn't cause such a major layout change. Am I missing something?
2. Regions 2.1 and 2.2 stick together. How can we add some breathing room between them?
3. If the page template is changed to One Level Tabs, No Sidebar, the behaviour changes. All the regions are rendered in 1 column, ignoring the New Column grid layout setting. Why is this?
4. In general, with all the layout changes in 4.x, I was under the impression that, when using a HTML Table based page template, simply using the New Grid/New Row/New Column, etc attributes on the Region attributes would be sufficient to build pages with intuitive, declarative layouts with arbitrary "boxes" laid out on the page, regardless of the content/region type. But that doesn't appear to be the case.
Can some CSS expert (here's looking at you, Paul) please share some insights on how all this works?
Thanks

Answer 1

VANJ wrote:
Can some CSS expert (here's looking at you, Paul) please share some insights on how all this works?Hi Vikas
Regions 1.1 and 1.2 are supposed to be in the same row in different columns so 1.1 has New Grid=Yes and 1.2 has New Column=Yes. Ditto for 2.1 and 2.2With table-based region layout I'm getting a Column number selector rather than a New Column switch.
1. Trial and error shows that simply changing the Pagination of report region 1.1 from None to Bottom-Right causes the layout to shift such that 1.2 moves to a grid row by itself! What is going on here? Surely a "trivial" change like whether pagination is displayed or not shouldn't cause such a major layout change. Am I missing something? No abstruse CSS here, just Pagination Sub-template and table-less layouts coming home to roost.
Unlike the majority of report templates, the 2-column portlet report template doesn't have an outer HTML <tt>table</tt> to act as a container for the engine-generated pagination <tt>tr</tt>. The pagination row is thus treated by the browser as starting a new row in the current open table&mdash;the region layout. Having the pagination <tt>tr</tt> injected into the 2-column portlet source turns it into tag soup. The whole thing spectacularly fails HTML validation.
I expect the official Oracle line is that 2-column portlet reports are not supposed to use pagination.
2. Regions 2.1 and 2.2 stick together. How can we add some breathing room between them?Add this rule to the page Inline CSS. This will add some space on the left of all region cells except the first in the row.
.regionlayout td+td {
  padding-left: 10px;
3. If the page template is changed to One Level Tabs, No Sidebar, the behaviour changes. All the regions are rendered in 1 column, ignoring the New Column grid layout setting. Why is this?If this is the layout shown in your link above then I'm not reproducing it. Can you upload an export of your app and provide a link to it?