Cover Page Revisited

rbuser

In a message dated January 4th, 2001, Jim Bennett described a way of
handling cover pages which only print if the device is the printer and not
the screen. I have already created a cover page "Report" which is a single
page. Is there a way I can call this report object to return the page as a
TppPage object and have it print in another report as the cover page? Does
that even make sense? :-)

Mark Greenhaw
OneDomain, Inc.
xmark@onedomain.comx
(remove the x's to reply via email)

digitalmetaphors

One way to do this would be to save your one page report to a template file
(rtm). Then load the template into a subreport in the titleband of both
reports. Also, check out the dynamic subreport loading demo in the
RBuilder\Demos\EndUser\DynamicSubreportLoading folder of the RBuilder
installation for more examples of taking this a step further.

Or, since you are wanting to deal with a page object, then it may make more
sense to create a page object and its draw commands in code. This way you
can call it for more than one report. Here is an example of adding a page
object to a report at the beginning for a title page. Basically convert your
title report to be created dynamically with draw commands.

http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/AddPageObject.zip


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Jim,

Here is my dilemma (and I am trying to simplify distribution i.e. no
template files)....

I need a "stock" cover page. Three labels, two memo components in the
middle, two lines, two images, and one system variable. I need one image to
be imbedded and one image to be dynamic. I need to pass the contents of the
fields as seen in the procedure description below.

procedure CreateCoverPage (var CPage: TppPage; AGraphic: string; MList:
TStrings; BList: TStrings;
Landscape: boolean = TRUE; TopFooter: string = ? MyCompany, Inc
2003';
BottomFooter: string = 'Authored by me'; ATitle: string = 'Report
Title');

The code to do this is housed in it's own unit so it can be used for all
reports. All of the reports are contained in their own self-instantiating
datamodules and are passed the "prepared" cover page (TppPage). Although
the report is landscape, the cover page is printing as portrait and all of
the drawn components' positions are really funky. I use inches as my
measurement for the report but when the cover page is created I must use
Thousands of MM. Could this be the reason for the funky positioning? Also,
when creating the cover page I can't assign the Autosize value or load Image
contents.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Mark Greenhaw
OneDomain, Inc.
xmark@onedomain.comx
(remove the x's to reply via email)

digitalmetaphors

I see. You could use the title band of every report but that duplicates the
contents in every report. Dynamic subreport loading is the preferred way to
do this. However, you don't want templates. Template are the way to go on
this, but if you want to do it another way, then that is cool too.

I think you will want an approach where you print the title page report in
memory before you print one of the other reports. For example, create a
TppDevice and hook it up to the title report. Then print that. Now you can
pull the page from its cache. This will allow you to configure the title
page for every report so you can load a different image is you want. Now all
you have to do is stickthis page object at the beginning of the other report
and send that to the devices as shown in part by the prvious demo which
created the page object. Instead of creating it by hand, you let RB create
it. Adding it at the beginning of another report is the same by sending it
to the printer first.

Here is the example of using a TppDevice and Report.CachePages to get the
pages in memory and send them to the printer device manually:
http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/PrintReportBackwards.zip

Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors