I have a portal which display fields songs titles from related tables. One such field indicate the Genre of the song.

I'd like the portal row to change color based on the Genre field.

My current implementation has a text field containing a space and sized the same as the portal row with conditional formatting. While this basically works, I find it inelegant, plus, when editing the layout, it's another object to deal with.

Suggestions?  

Unfortunately, conditional formatting cannot be applied to a portal row directly. You must use some textual object such as a text block, button or a field.

However, once the object is in place, you can lock it to make editing easier.