Vertical Elasticity on Field is not working when the data contains - in it.

Question

Hi,
I have a report which has to print a large invoice number(around 30 characters) per invoice line, but I got only space for 12-14 characters, so I have set the vertical elasticity property of the field to Expand which makes the data to wrap to the next line.
But if the data contains any '-' character in it, the data wraps to the next line even though there is enough space on the current line.
Sample outputs:
When the vertical elasticity is set to Expand
<p>
Invoice Number Invoice Description
123456789023 First Invoice on first line
345678957694
347634763476
12345678-     Second Invoice but the number gets wrapped because of the hyphen
345734573476
569456573456
When the vertical elasticity is set to Fixed
Invoice Number Invoice Description
123456789023 First Invoice on first line
12345678-345     Second Invoice but the number does not get wrapped after hyphen
</p>
Is it a bug on reports editor, how do I avoid this?
I would like to see the output like the following,
Invoice Number Invoice Description
123456789023 First Invoice on first line
345678957694
347634763476
12345678-345     Second Invoice number with correct format.
734573476569
456573456
PS: The version of the Report Builder is 10.1.2.0.2
Thanks in Advance,
Senthil

Answer 1

It looks as if the logic that Oracle Reports uses to determine where to break the line is interpreting the "-" character differently from other characters. This is probably because it is used (at least in English) to break words at the end of a line (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Justification_and_line-wrapping).
One workaround might be to replace "-" character with another character (or more) that looks the same (or similar), but that Oracle Reports does not interpret differently from other characters. For me (on Windows), CHR(173) seems to work. However, whether or not it works for you will depend on whatever character set(s) you're using. The same goes for the Unicode characters like U+2010 (hyphen), U+2011 (non-breaking hyphen), and U+2212 (minus).
For example, in your data model, you might try replacing your current invoice number column with an expression that looks something like this:
REPLACE(YOUR_INVOICE_NUMBER_COLUMN, '-', CHR(173))
Hope this helps.