Displaying textarea on a report
Say I create a Form and Report on a table containing a CLOB column. The Form wizard renders the CLOB column as a textarea. That's fine, it is supposed to contain lots of verbose descriptive data.
But when I save the form page and go back to the report page, the report looks ugly because of all the "fat" textarea columns, each with a varying width depending on the data in that row/column.
I see the following options
1. Style the report cell containing textarea to a fixed height/width and overflow:auto. This will at least make all the report rows the same height.
2. Just don't display the darn textarea column on the report. If you need to see it, click on the Edit record button and see it in editable mode. Clearly, not a preferred option.
3. Just display the first N characters of the textarea on the report
4. Do some DHTML magic on the report page to get the best of both worlds.
What is the best practice to handle this sort of UI pattern?
Comments?
Thanks