A way to format the color and/or style of text displayed within an a!gridField component?

Question

#TempoReports Does anyone know of a way to format the color and/or style of text displayed within an a!gridField component? I've been asked to find a way to automatically highlight critical items in a grid that is displayed in a Tempo report. I've tried using an a!richTextItem component in the data field of each a!gridTextColumn in the grid field, but that didn't work. Any other ideas? 
 OriginalPostID-163996 
 OriginalPostID-163996

Stefan Helzle · Accepted Answer

Why not use an icon column?

Mike Schmitt · Answer

One trick I've employed here and there is to find an icon in Unicode text and insert that into selected rows of a grid row, for example prepended to the text (separated by a space or something). There are literally thousands of unicode icons available and Appian can easily display most (or almost all) of them.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

Correct, you would be stuck with default color (as they are just "text"). As far as size is concerned, it's probably best to fish around and find an icon that displays appropriately at default-size on a SAIL form. For instance, I wanted to prepend a "right arrow" to indicate a dynamic-link-selected item in a paging grid, so I found one that's basically like a filled sideways triangle (char(9658), i think), which looks great on SAIL forms and not too tiny. In another place I used a floppy disk icon, and/or a document icon, to designate the column header of a column where an actual image was used to indicate a downloadable file (since the column header has to be text). To unify things (and keep them somewhat consistent), I wrote a global expression rule named something like "getUnicodeIcon", where if I pass in text like "rightArrow" it returns the above arrow image, "disk" returns the floppy disk one, and likewise with others that i've continued to add. But that's not strictly necessary for a basic one-shot implementation.

Stefan Helzle · Answer

You can use the iconIndicator function. Another source is to use the iconNewsEvent() function, save the image and crop it to remove the border. Better than loading icons from google images and get problems with copyright.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

@sikhivahans: there are various unicode character search sites (unfortunately most are laden with ads and a little clunky); usually when I need a novel unicode icon I just google it, i.e. searching for "unicode right arrow", "unicode floppy disk icon", etc.