Ben Forta

I was working on a report today, and needed horizontal dotted lines between columns in each row, essentially joining the columns to make it easier to read across. There is no automated way to do this in the ColdFusion Report Builder, but Mr. CF Reports (aka Dean Harmon) sent me this brilliant hack …
Change the field contents from:
query.column
To
query.column & ". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."
(yep, append lots of .’s with spaces between each). The spaces are key, the reporting engine tries to fit in as many whole words as it can, and without the spaces it’ll try to embed all of the .’s or none at all. As long as the Stretch With Overflow property for the field is set to FALSE, the reporting engine will display the column values followed by as many .’s as can fit. Nice!