Sliding/Printing - This time it's personal!

[DrRoebuck]

TRYING to print a billing statement with two portals: invoices and payments. Each portal is 100 rows to allow for plenty of activity during the month.

Everything is fine except the second portal. The headers above the second portal properly slide up to near the bottom of the first portal. But the second portal itself starts after 4 or 5 blank pages.

Yes, sliding is turned on for all necessary objects.

Yes, the body is reduced to the point that it's touching the lowest object in the body.

Is this yet another bug?

Thanks for any tips.

--Frustrated.

[Brian Davidson]

Have you tried using a traditional report layout? Portals are really not designed for printing. I created a report used for detailing equipment used in building computer sysems. Each line item needed a diffrent amount of space depending on how long the description was. With a little tweaking with the slideing/printing , it worked perfectly. And that was in v5.5. It may seem a bit more difficult to create than some portals on a layout, but the results are going to be much better and a lot more flexible.

[Mike D.]

Brian is correct. Printing from portals is always prone to problems. Sometimes you can get away with it, but at some point it will come back to haunt you. You will get much better results by creating a layout specifically for reporting using sub-summaries.

HTH, Mike

[DrRoebuck]

Thanks for the thoughts. I would normally set it up like that, but the two portals show records from two different tables. In FM6 I did layouts like this all the time and never had a problem. I could merge the two tables into one, but that's going to create a lot of extra work that should be unnecessary.

[DrRoebuck]

For right now, what I've decided to do is create a table that is strictly for the purpose of printing statements. It contains copies of the necessary fields from invoices and payments, and imports the proper data before printing.

[DrRoebuck]

Well, now I've spent the last few hours changing this whole thing around. I've gotten it to work using list view instead of portals, EXCEPT ...

The Print Preview looks perfect, the actual printout does not. It does not show the second sub-summary of records.

Any ideas?

--VERY Frustrated

[Ender]

Could you post a screenshot of the layout showing the sub-summary parts?

[DrRoebuck]

Hey Ender

I'm actually currently using my one free phone call with FM support. The gentleman I was speaking with has had to take my program for the night so he can take a longer time to look at it.

[hubolinc]

I'm having the same issue. 3 related tables. If they don't start on the first page then they will not slide. Worked fine in 6.

To test I changed the print driver to PDF made a customer page size that is 30 inches long no problem everything slides when it is on the first page.

[Deep Thought II]

same prob here if u have 2 or more portals on the layout... i never got the second portal to print correctly either.

it is just as Dr said... the second portal got printed a few blanks away, and if it gets printed badly if it goes across pages...

better to use list view or report...