Sliding print problem - unwanted blank pages

[ctz243]

Hi

I'm testing FileMaker 7.02 on Panther 10.3.4. I've developed an accounting program in FileMaker 6 that prints invoices. They have a variable number of line items so I use a portal and sliding to allow invoices with lots of lines to print on two pages whereas those with only a few line items can fit on one page.

This works perfectly in FIleMaker 6, but on testing in FileMaker 7 random unwanted blank pages are printed. This seems to be a repeatable bug in the sliding/printing behaviour. Has anyone else found it, and are there any workarounds?

I've been able to replicate the problem reliably. Basically the report has some fields on top, then a portal with say 50 lines where each line is a line item, then a few more fields at the bottom. I use no header or footer; there is only a body section. I set all fields for sliding / printing with all the sliding up settings 'on' (sliding up, all above, reducing size of enclosed part. Everything fits *exactly* inside two page breaks; the break between goes almost clean through the middle of the portal of 50 lines.

In FileMaker 6 this worked fine and was totally reliable.

In Filemaker 7, all the sliding works, although there is always a blank portal row at the bottom of the line item list that should not be there. That's a bug but one I can live with. But for some bizarre reason a lot of blank pages pop up both before and after otherwise apparently normal invoices. There seems to be no predictability about it. Even pages with only one or two invoice lines may get a blank one after. In Print Preview and in PDF output this problem remains. I've checked that there are no 'hidden' fields anywhere, and done a 'select all' before setting the sliding... any other ideas?

If I shrink the portal to 8 lines, and make sure that every single field fits into one page, then there's no blank page problem anymore. But if I have to rely on sliding/printing - lots of annoying paper waste.

It seems very easy to replicate. I'd be grateful if others could test this and get back to me.

Do I have to rebuild the layout from scratch in FileMaker 7?

Any ideas? Solutions?

Thanks - chris.

[BeckhamTX]

Im having the same problem...

I have a db with 5 tables. I need to print info from 4 of them togeher. I have a layout based on one table and portals showing data from the other 3 tables. I have made the portals to display 20 rows each (there will be anywhere form 1 - 20 related records for each report). I use sliding, but I have two problems:

1 - the last row of text in the portal on the page prints half on page 1 and half on the top of page 2.

2 - Even if each of the 3 portals only has a few records, and it should all fit to a page, it prints out an extra second page with no info on it.

[-Queue-]

If the portal's relationship is defined to allow creation of related records, then displaying a blank bottom row is not a bug; it is intentional. You need a duplicate relationship that does not allow creation of related records, if you want to remove the blank row.

That said, portals are not designed for printing. It is much easier to print from a child table, or, in Beckham's case, from another table that is designed to temporarily hold data from the other four. You can isolate the desired records in each table and import them into the extra table, using a type field for subsummaries, etc. You may be able to import just the ids from each table and create four relationships to reference the related data, then stack similar related fields in the body to display the desired related record.