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Refresh and Recalculation

edited September 2003 in End User
Hello,
I am using a template with report builder 7.02 and have the following
effects when printing from the preview screen:

1) It has two basic steps first accessing data, then the page count. When it
does the page count basically it appear to force a refresh/invalidate on the
preview Window. This can be seen on the preview controls, scale, prev./next,
also on PC that have fairly high performance it is not very visible. The
problem our end user has fairly slow PCs so get this flash effect page1,
refresh, page2, refresh, page..... Is this a new feature ? Can it be turned
off ?

2) When I run a print with preview it initially calculated the number of
pages, normal, I can then navigate within my report. But if I print the
report and try and navigate after it will re-calculate the whole report
again. So it appear that there is "dirty flag set if we do a print from the
preview. I can't see why this is required ? Is there any way to stop this
recalculation ?

brgds
Alex

Comments

  • edited September 2003
    Hi Alex,

    The preview should behave better than ever if you are using RB 7.01 or
    higher. We have old 266 mhz machines running RB just fine. The has to be
    some kind of flash because the pages have to be redrawn, but it should not
    be noticable because there will be a white background drawn and then the
    page is drawn. We lock the window with a call to the Win API to
    LockWindowUpdate for hte best performance, if it can acquire the lock since
    only one window can be locked at a time in Windows. Are you using a two pass
    report? Can you reproduce the problem with our demo reports?

    If you print the report and the selected printer from the dialog is
    different than the report's default printer setup printer name, then RB will
    regenerate the report for the newly selected printer. It has to do this
    because the screen preview is generated specifically for the selected
    printer.

    Cheers,

    Jim Bennett
    Digital Metaphors


  • edited September 2003
    Hello Jim,
    It is a two pass report, the flashing only happens on certain reports.
    NB it is the preview controls in the toolbar that flash not the actual print
    preview. (LockWindowUpdate appears to be related to graphics ?).

    For the re-calculation I have tested on not changing the printer, i.e.. I
    preview and print on the default printer, the report still recalculates
    after a print.

    On a ten page report this is not a problem on a 300 page report both of the
    above become a pain.

    Hope you can give us some news

    cheers

    Alex


  • edited September 2003
    Hi Alex,

    If it only happens on certain reports, then can you send an example that I
    can run on one of our slower machines? The slowest we have is a P2 266, but
    it has a good video card unfortunately so I may not be able to reproduce the
    problem. Send all attachments to support@digital-metaphors.com

    Cheers,

    Jim Bennett
    Digital Metaphors


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