Printing invoice/order documents

rbuser

Hi,

We are trying out an evaluation version of ReportBuilder V6 Enterpise
edition for use in our new application. We are extremely impressed with the
tool especially in consideration of our previous reporting tool.

A major setback with our previous tool was the inability to force a section
of a report to be printed at the bottom of the last page of a report. This
is a considerable limitation when trying to enable the user to print invoice
and order documents. The only way we could do it was to print it in the
Page Footer section which worked fine on 1 page documents but on multi-page
documents it printed the section at the bottom of each page.

In trying out RB we are experiencing the same problem. We would assume that
as RB is a very popular tool that you have overcome such limitations and
therefore we would appreciate it if you could provide some pointers as to
how to print a section at the bottom of the last page of report. If we can
overcome this problem with your tool we can see no other reason why we
should not integrate it into our latest application.

Thank you in advance of your help.

Regards

Gareth Connor
Adaptev Ltd.
Manchester
UK

digitalmetaphors

You can use the footerband. However, you'll have to toggle the visibility so
that it only prints on the last page. One way to do it is to check to see if
you are on the last page of the report. Set the Report.PassSetting to
psTwoPass. Then at the end of the first pass before the first page is sent
to a device, you'll know the page count. Then in the sceond pass, in the
Footerband.BeforePrint event, you can compare Report.AbsolutePageCount to
Report.AbsolutePageNo to determine if the footer should be visible. Another
way to do it is to set the visibility based on Report.Datapipeline.EOF,
which will be true after the last detail band prints on the last page, which
is also happens before the footer BeforePrint event fires.

What if you want a footer on every page and a separate summary band on the
last page? Set Footerband.PrintOnLastPage to false. Then use the
summaryband to print the information. Use the Summaryband.PrintPosition
property to tell the summary band to begin printing at a specified position
on the page so that it appears to be alinged to the bottom. This will work
for a static height summary band. The report engine doesn't handle a dynamic
height summary band which is aligned to the bottom.

To print a summary band which is dynamic height, aligned to the bottom,
you'll have to let the report engine generate the summaryband normally and
then reposition the output draw commands on the output page object right
before the page is sent to the output device.
http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/AlignSummaryToBottom.zip

Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Thank you for your quick response.

I have tried your first suggestion which is to do with making the footer
visible based on the EOF, which is similar to what I was doing before. The
problem with this is that when previewing the document which has a few pages
even though it makes the footer invisible it leaves it's space blank.

Anyway I tried you other suggestion to do with using the summary band and I
had better results with it. The only problem is that I use regions to
display the invoice total and other summaries so when calculating the
position of the summary band I thought all I need to add to the TList is the
region which in turn will move all of it's child controls. I had to add all
of the controls belonging to the region to the TList using
fDrawCommandList.Add(aDrawCommand);

Am I doing something wrong or is this how it works. I have set
ShiftWithParent to True on all the controls belonging to the region.

Regards

Gareth Connor

digitalmetaphors

Yes, each individual control creates an output draw command. You are doing
it correctly.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors