inspecting report field position properties

All,

Apparently, within a CR function or formula, most, if not all, of a report field's properties are inaccessible. We have a requirement to allow users to toggle columns off/on. As columns are toggled off, I'd like to move the columns on the right leftward by the width of the suppressed column. I can do this if I create a list containing field name/width pairs which I use at run time to calculate the X offset, if any, for each report field. What I'd really like to do is "inspect" the width property of each (relevant) field.

I assume from looking at the RAS SDK that one can inspect a field using the getWidth method. What's not clear to me is if I can develop a class to do this and then reference it (server side) from a CR report function at runtime. We could do this from the Java application that requests the report, but that seem less than desirable.

Thanks,

pf