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Report horizontally crossing pages

edited August 2001 in General
Hi,

I need to print a report of schedules.

The records down the page are the scheduled jobs. Across the page are many
columns that graphically indicate whether a job is to be executed at a
given time.

The problem here is that the horizontal extent may be arbitrarily large. A
user could decide to print a schedule spanning a whole year shown in a
resolution of days. That would result in 365 slots of data (sparsely
populated with icons) plus some to identify the job.

So what I would need is something like a report that I can design with a
"virtual width". That width would be larger than the available page-width
and would thus have to be rendered on several pages.

Another way to look at it is that I do not need multiple columns on a
single page but something like "fractional columns" :-).

The best I have come up with until now is to design two reports. One for
the start of each timeline, the part where the identification of a row
("what job?") is to be printed. And another one for possible continuation
on another page across.

When printing I would have to print one, two, or many reports,
reconfiguring the datasource to select the proper subset of data each time.

This of course makes end-user-reporting next to impossible :-).

Another thing I have thought of is to conceptually turn the report 90
degrees sideways and print time as rows and jobs as columns. That is not
really a solution as there may as well be more Jobs than fit a page.

Any more ideas how to approach that?

Ciao, MM
--
Marian Aldenhövel, Hainstraße 8, 53121 Bonn, Germany
http://www.marian-aldenhoevel.de

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