portal printing

[acoustic_overdrive]

I have made a lovely layout for invoicing that has three portals on the page showing

1. related time billing items

2. expenses items

3. payments made towards this invoice

the data for these portals are all related by a serial number to the table of invoices.

This is fine but when I come to print I understand i shouldn't use portals because they can not expand infinitely and i can't seem to get them to slide very well over pagebreaks.

I hear the solution is to print from a table view in one of the related databases, but this will surely only give me data for that section whereas I want one report with three sections to cover labour, expenses and payments.

Is this possible? I just cannot work it out.

I really want these sections to be infinately expandible so do not want to use repeating fields to give me a fixed number of slots to fill in.

[aaa]

Hi, acoustic_overdrive!

Here i attached you example for portal printing.

It is discomfort that different portals prints in different pages, but if you want it have on the same page create 3 container field and paste there 3 preview mode picture.

Portal_Print.zip

[acoustic_overdrive]

That is exactly the relationship I want but as far as i can see this method means printing out portals (which are only designed for on-screen use), which means that if any portal had more than 4 records (in this particular example), they would be cut off.

I know i could make them much bigger than needed and then use sliding to make them shrink to remove unused lines but I think there will always be a finite number of acceptable entries before they start to get cut off. And in any case when I made my portals around 35 lines deep they did not seem to slide properly over page breaks and things got very confused.

So what I am wondering is: is there a way to print from "view as table" with more than one repeating body part. The 1st one would show all the related records from table1, the second from table 2 and the third from table 3. and in between each body part there would be an appropriate header describing what follows in the table below.

[SlimJim]

I had almost exactly this problem some years ago with an earlier version of FileMaker and I resolved it by using a single "Items" (file)table. So each record in that table has a type - in my case I only needed Invoice (item), payment (item), credit note (item). All records have an invoice number and a client number (both must be non-empty) there are also fields for payment numbers and credit note numbers and a set of fields which cover debits and credits. You can also add description fields etc as you wish.

The type of amalgamation that you are looking for on your invoice print-out is then possible as all items are in the one table and you can sort them out by sorting on the item description. If necessary you can use a custom sort so that they come in the correct order on your invoice.

You then have separate tables for the "parents": Invoices, Receipts and Credit Notes.

[aaa]

Not, if you try, you will see in printing pages all portal rows, only in different pages.

[SlimJim]

I am suggesting doing it without portals in a layout on the underlying items table.

[acoustic_overdrive]

To aaa:

Sorry but when I added more data to your example so that the first portal had six entries in it rather than 3, the printout is missing entries 5 and 6 because the portal is only 4 lines in size. And also on my system the portals print on the same page (which is what I want), not separate pages.

To Slim Jim:

Yes this sounds like it would achieve what I want but I suppose the small problem is that different tables really require different columns of information to be displayed, for example my top section, labour, needs dates, start and finish times, description, hourly rate etc. but the expenses needs description, supplier,receipt number and cost.

Maybe your idea could be extended so that the fields could be field1, filed2, field3... rather than date, start time and finish time... and these fields would contain different information depending upon if the record was for labour, expenses or payments, but this leads to the problem of requiring some fields to be formatted as money, some time and some text.

In all though i can't quite believe that there isn't a simple way of printing three different tables of related records on one page with this powerful application. Surely this is the type of thing I receive through the post every day?

[Vink]

Believe it or not I have exactly the same problem. Reading this Post it seemed I had written it.

But I also still do not have the solution, and can't believe that printing portals across page brakes is not possible (without missing records).

Regards,

Jeroen

[acoustic_overdrive]

Digging a little deeper in this forum I've found two related posts:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/165945/

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/169247/

This suggests that Filemaker 7 (which is what I'm using) has a problem printing or sliding portals over several pages anyway. But it does seem that portals are not really the ideal solution to this kind of problem if they are indeed limited to 1000 rows. And in any case they will always have to be set to a finite number which is not ideal.

So one of the two proposed ideas could work:

1. Restructuring the database so every invoice item is stored in one table but with a field to identify each record as a member of a particular subset

2. Make some kind of intermediate table to collect all records from several tables and sort into sections for printing

The next problem that occurs to me is whether it is possible to have section headers that are in larger, different type. I assume these would actually be records themselves in order for them to appear part way through the one table. I am a novice at FileMaker but I can't see a way to format certain rows differently. So I suppose the headers would have to appear to the left in a column reserved simply for this. Any help on this would be great.

And similarly, is there a way to do this and have different sections with different configurations of columns with different data formats?

[Vink]

I made a step forward. I upgraded to FMP 8, and the problem appears to be solved! So now no records seem to be disappearing due to page breaks, sliding is done properly and no empty pages at the end.

Since the number of lines on my invoice are far from unlimited, even if there is a limit of 1000 lines in a portal that will not bother me.

And since I can use a portal, I can just put the headers in the layout above the portal.

Now I can continue properly.

[acoustic_overdrive]

OK that's pretty cool, but I'm not quite satisfied that filemaker seems to be unable to accomplish this relatively simple concept properly.

So I think I'm going to dive in and work out how to generate my own report in HTML or RTF and format it exactly the way I require.