Am I in big trouble ?

[Ugo DI LUCA]

I've just read an old post on inventory where it was said "Next, you never print from a portal, print the P.O. from the P.O. Line Items file".Live Oak 09/15/02 12:54 AM

May be I didn't understand. If not, I'm in big trouble...Let see

I use portals for every Order Form, Invoice, Quotation,....

In summary, for instance, to edit an Invoice I use datas from

- A Product DB

- A Client DB

- A Central DB that compills all the information (quantity, net price, customer orders N

[jasonwood]

I was a little shocked to hear it my first time too!

My solution still prints from the invoices database, it does print a portal. I do see the benefit of printing from the line items database however, and I'd like to try it eventually.

Portals become especially troublesome when there is more than one page worth of line items. It can be difficult to get the alignment right for portals occupying multiple pages, and you have to have separate layouts depending on how many pages you are printing (chosen based on a script that counts the line items when you print).

To print from line items, you simply find the set of line items attached to that invoice, then set up a layout where the header and footer contain related fields (related back to the invoices database).

Those are the key points as I understand them. I'd still like to hear what others have to say about this, since it's kindof a new idea to me too.

--

Jason Wood

HeyWoody.com

[kennedy]

I print portals often. BUT, I only print them when its NOT an issue if it only prints a portion of the list... the portion visible without scrolling. Oh, AND all my layouts are designed so they fit in a single printed page... so no worries about getting half a line of text on one page and half a line on another.

As far as I know, that answer from LiveOak is the standard answer when someone asks how they either a) get the whole list inside the Portal to print, or deal with a really long portal that runs off the bottom of the printed page onto another page. In both cases, the answer is "don't do that"... print the long list from the child file... where you get FMP's built-in functionality for dealing with lists via a List layout.

Smart guys, are there any other issues dealing with printing of portals?

[BobWeaver]

Some time back (like version 3 maybe) there were a lot of problems reported when printing portals. I think a lot of this has now been fixed, but FMI's official position still is that portals are really intended for display only. I haven't had any problems in versions 5.0 or later, although I have heard others report that portal lines print over top of each other. This may have been a situation where the portal field held more text than would fit in a single line.

Printing from the line items file gives you a lot more flexibility over sorting, summarizing, and display formatting than you could hope to get from printing a portal.

On the other hand, I've had some situations recently where printing a portal was the easiest way to generate a somewhat complex report. This happens when you need to have different found sets of records with different sort orders and summaries on the same page. Printing portals is the simple answer in this case.

[Vaughan]

Sliding/printing still does not work within portals, but portals themselves will slide up if so formatted.