Last-page footer

[stanley]

Hi all:

I posted a question in January about this, but the post and answers were lost when the forums went down. The situation is this:

I'm doing some print layouts for a customer, and he wants certain information to appear (small print, signature, etc) at the bottom of the last page. Someone showed me a trick involving a dummy subsummary part, with the fields to be printed at the bottom actually being part of the header, then extending through the dummy subsummary (fields aligned:bottom) to print at the bottom. It took a bit of tweaking, but works fine.

However, if the printout is longer than one page, I'm now dealing with having a title header as well, and suddenly the thing doesn't work. (Naturally, the client wants a different header for all pages after the first one...) I mean, I can't even see my fields coming up at all.

So, if anyone knows where I found this trick, or if anyone has any clever ideas, I'd be thrilled to hear them. Like I said, I have it working for a single page pretty well, but more than that, and I get nothing at all.

-Stanley

[stanley]

Now that I have fiddled with this problem some more, I discover that the fields I want to display simply aren't coming up in Preview mode at all. They display fine in Browse mode, but in Preview they are nonexistent, even though I have started over with a copy of my one-page layout, which as I said before, works just fine. I'm baffled.

-Stanley

[stanley]

Eureka! I am an idiot. (Which is why I am working at 1 am on a Sunday night)

What was happening was this: some of my test data is incomplete, due to being part of the debugging process, and thus the fields I'm looking for were not populated in every record being used in the printout. Thus, although they appeared in Browse (being present in the first record) they did not appear in Preview (not being present everywhere...) Problem solved.

Still, there's got to be an easier way to print a last-page footer.

-Stanley

[BobWeaver]

I think it was me that suggested the dummy part in one or two threads, but you don't necessarily need to go that route. You may be able to simply have a conditional calculated field in the footer so that it will display nothing unless it's on the last page.

Case(Status(CurrentRecordNumber)=Status(CurrentFoundCount),LastPageFooterStuff,"")

But as I recall, you wanted to have the last page footer a different size than the footer on the other pages. That makes it tricky.

[stanley]

Bob:

That's it exactly; the footer at the bottom of the last page is about 3 inches; otherwise the footer is just the page number.

I've used your solution pretty well - as I said last night, I figured out my error - but now I've run into another problem. If (using the dummy part you showed me before) I've got a three-page printout, the footer appears on pages 2 and 3; is there any workaround you know of to get it to only print on the very last page?

Thanks

-Stanley

[BobWeaver]

The trick is in knowing that you are on the last page while you are still in the header. You could subtract the current record number from the found count, and if that is less than the number of records that will fit on the page, then you are on the last page, so you then take the appropriate action. I can't remember exactly what method you were using to change the footer graphics. If it was a calculated container field then you could use the above test as the condition.