I want to control width on column in report screen - new user

Question

the file is "CHANGEMANAGEMENT"
The field is "REQUEST_DESCRIPTION" - It is 2000 characters
I can't find a combination of settings that will allow me to set the width on a column for a screen so that the screen doesn't have to scroll away to the right. If I change the type to text area, I can set the width but it opens it up so that it doesn't look like a report. (It looks like the screen that I'm typing this into.) Plus it holds all the spaces so that the report is much larger than it needs to be.
The report screen is from a PL/SQL query - similar to
select * from "CHANGEMANAGEMENT" - with a join to another table with another large field.

Answer 1

Hi CheekyFellow,
I hope the following will make it a bit clearer:
When a report is being generated, a table is created (in HTML, this is a <TABLE></TABLE> tag) to hold the data. Within this, each record is added as a new row (a <TR></TR> tag) and within this each field is inserted as cell (a <TD></TD> tag) - the data itself is inserted between the <TD> tag and the corresponding </TD> closing tag.
When you apply styling using the CSS Style setting, it can not update the <TD> tag as this has already been created, so it wraps the column's value within a <SPAN></SPAN> tag applying your style setting to the SPAN tag (eg, <SPAN style="color:blue">xxxxx</SPAN> will turn the text blue). SPAN tags are normally used to apply font and colour styling to portions of text. Whilst you can add things such as width settings, SPAN tags are not "block" elements in HTML (ie, they are not rectangles on the page) but are "inline" elements (ie, they flow with the text they surround), so setting dimensions will not necessarily produce the result you expect. As an example, a TABLE is a block element because it has dimensions that you can define and is rectangular in shape but a <B>xxx</B> tag (to switch bold on/off) is an inline element because it affects the text display not its layout.
Within a table, a column is made up of a collection of <TD> cells. The maximum width of these cells determines the width of the column. You can override this by adding in a <COL> tag definition immediately after the <TABLE> definition. In our reports, we don't get this opportunity because the table, tr and td tags have already been created. As we can not add in a COL tag in the report table itself, the only way to fix the width of a column is to fix the width of the <TD> cells within that column and the only way to do this is to add in an HTML element that you can fix the width for. With the additional requirement of needing word-wrapping in the contents of the cell, you can only really use a <TD> cell and, therefore, you need to construct an entire table (albeit one that has only one row and one column) - hence my suggestion shown above.
Regards
Andy