Controlling Report Themes

Owned by ken.miller
Sept 16, 2024
3 min read

At present it is not possible to assign a particular theme to a report. The report picks up the default theme for the dashboard as a whole.

This is the theme listed in global settings PI_STYLES variable.

image-20240916-091049.png

In the example above it is using the piBerry theme. This theme includes a background colour of grey (#eeeeee).

 

image-20240916-091247.png

 

This may be desirable as a background colour in the dashboard as a whole.

 

It is in this case creating the lines around the chart cells, but when we generate a report it will create a less desirable background. In this case my pages are now grey - an that is going to waste a lot of ink if I print the report.

 

There is a trick to get around this.

Firstly I will copy my theme, and call it piBerry Report.

Setting the background to white (#ffffff) - and i’d make any other report specific changes.

Now I set this to the global theme variable.

Now the reports will have the desired appearance.

 

 

However, the dashboard does not. Now we can set a PI_STYLES on any user or role. If we want all users to have the piBerry role back for the dashboards - then the best thing to do is to add it as a variable on a role that is granted to everyone.

 

Then this role is granted to all users.

Now all users (with this role) will see the piBerry theme, and the reports will use the system piBerry Report theme.

So their dashboards look as,

Whilst reports generated look as,

 

Note users can still override or have themes overridden individually using this approach. This variable can also be set for all users through the API, or user Sync rather than through the UI.