The articles in this section of the Knowledge Base involve working with Auto-Size properties in Report Designer. To learn additional information regarding Auto-Sizing properties, see Understanding Auto-Sizing Properties in Report Designer.
This article is regarding automatically resizing Panel components.
Panels are only containers, and they output no visual information in the report. It may seem that the Can Shrink and Can Grow properties have no relevance to Panels, but this is not the case.
Panels can contain components for display, and these components may have specified sizes and positions. When the boundaries of the component cross the border of the Panel they are contained in, then setting the Can Grow property to true causes the Panel to be resized so that the child components are enclosed. Figure 01 demonstrates how the Can Grow property works:
Fig. 01 – Can Grow Set to True and Can Grow Set to False
For demonstration purposes, the Panel in Figure 01 had a background brush applied so it would show up in the rendered report.
When the Can Shrink property is set to true, and components within the Panel are smaller than the bounds of the Panel, the Panel reduces in size to fit the bounds of the combined interior components.