Portal Printing Bug

[ctz243]

Very obvious bug this one.

I have a report including a portal; each line on the portal contains fields from a related record.

Let's say there are 9 related records, FileMaker 7 always prints a blank line at the end of the portal - ie 10 lines all up!

Exactly the same code in FileMaker 6 resulted in only 9 lines being printed.

Any workaround / confirmation?

Thanks - chris.

[Michael Myett]

I'm not sure this is a bug? Portals have never been meant to be used in reports.

Portals were never designed to be printed. Portals don't slide well or break pages gracefully. Therefore, you should print your report from the related file. Use the goto related record [show only related] to isolate the correct records.

That doesn't mean for reports with small sets of related records on a one page report won't work using the portal, but its a bad habit that will get you in trouble when used with more complex multi-page reports.

[ctz243]

This 'extra line' problem happens with every printed portal, even if it is small and fits easily on a page. Try it and see.

It only happens in FileMaker 7 and never happened in FileMaker 6.

It's not a bug?

[Michael Myett]

I don't doubt your correct, but the chances of this being acknowledged as a bug are very slim, since printing from portals is not recommended, by FileMaker and most developers. Others please correct me if I am wrong about this.

[ctz243]

Two more things:

First, the portal is set to sliding so as to not show empty boxes if not all portal rows are occupied.

Second, I made a test file with a portal - and it does not show the empty boxes.

So I'm doing something to my portal that causes this. The exact same code in FM6 did not do this, and I can't figure why. I definitely don't have a spare blank record to explain it! Very odd.

If anyone has the same thing happen to them please let me know what they did to fix it.

thanks,

chris.

[ctz243]

Aha! Found how to fix it!

In my case, the portal was displaying invoice lines. The relationship between the invoice and the invoice lines permitted entry of invoice lines (obviously). This relationship was also used to populate the portals for the printing layout.

If I made another relationship, based on exactly the same linking strategy, but not permitting entry of invoice lines, and used this exclusively on the layouts to print from - voila! The extra (empty) portal row disappears.

I assume that this is a bug because FM6 didn't do it. It was smart enough to know that the 'entry' row at the bottom of a portal should not be printed. Unfortunately this is not the case in FM7 - although the workaround above solves the problem nicely!

thanks for those who've thought about this...

[bruceR]

"Printing from portals is not recommended."

Nonsense.

It is exactly like doing almost anything else in Filemaker. There are certain limitations (for instance row height will not shrink) and if those limitations are relevant to what you are trying to do, you may need to use another technique. But for instance, portal printing makes it easy to mix data from several relationships in a report.