Form Letter with graphics

[Alex_ND]

I'm currently building a Report that is mostly text but has a jpeg (via container) and portal on it that both need to print.

Is it possible to have these items slide with the text portion of this report? I've tried all the sliding options, but it doesn't seem to work. It seems as though the jpeg and portal stay where I placed them no matter how much text is in the text area.

Below is a sample screenshot. Notice when the text grew larger, the portal stayed and now appears to be on top of the text area. Thanks for any help and if anyone knows of a tutorial concerning this please let me know.

I guess another way of asking this would be can I place containers or portals within a text box?

Fullsize

Edited January 3, 2006 by Guest

[CoZiMan]

Umm. There are several discussion threads under the 'Portal' forum about printing the contents of a portal, and why they don't work well for that.

In your case the easiest workaround I can think of is to use a script to loop through the portal rows and copy all the relevant fields/text into a single text field then switch to a layout pre-formatted with the text fields and graphics in place with sliding options enabled.

I've got some pretty complex reports that do this exact same thing.

[Ender]

A better solution is to print from a layout based on the related table, and use a regular List View. The parent data that's common to all records can be placed in the Header or Footer parts.

[Zero Tolerence]

Umm. There are several discussion threads under the 'Portal' forum about printing the contents of a portal, and why they don't work well for that.

In your case the easiest workaround I can think of is to use a script to loop through the portal rows and copy all the relevant fields/text into a single text field then switch to a layout pre-formatted with the text fields and graphics in place with sliding options enabled.

I've got some pretty complex reports that do this exact same thing.

I've noticed that FM handles Copy and Paste features rather slowly, can you tell me what benifit you gain from doing things this way rather than with a related table?

[Alex_ND]

Ok, so now I have a script that finds the related records. It then fills a global text field with the 5 fields from the first related record, then loops and concatenates the next related record's fields until it finds the last record.

So now the global field DOES HAVE all the data in it. However, the text in the original related fields vary in length, so the global looks something like this:

1 Item1928 This is the decription $1000

1 Item182098 This is the decription for this line $1000

11 item1 Short Decription $30

Maybe a strange question, but is it possible to insert tabs into a calculation so that it's formatted correctly for print?

Thanks again

[mr_vodka]

I dont know if this is the asnwer you are looking for but entering Ctrl-Tab puts a tab in. I usually create a global field call gTab, shich store a Ctrl-Tab spacing. Then whenever I need a tab as part of a calculation, I just reference that global field.

[Alex_ND]

I dont know if this is the asnwer you are looking for but entering Ctrl-Tab puts a tab in. I usually create a global field call gTab, shich store a Ctrl-Tab spacing. Then whenever I need a tab as part of a calculation, I just reference that global field.

Good call. I'm close! I made the global tab field and the portion being looped in my script now reads:

gTempLineItems =

modelsQuoted::gTempLineItems &

modelsQuoted::ModelName & global::gTab&

modelsQuoted::ModelQnty & global::gTab&

modelsQuoted::ModelPrice & global::gTab&

modelsQuoted::modelSubTotal & ¶

When the model name is short the row still does not line up quite right:

Usually this wouldn't be a big deal as you could easily fix it manually, but I'm using it as a merge field on a layout. Maybe I'm wasting my time on this, I don't really know. But if anyone has any advice thanks in advance!

[Alex_ND]

I scrapped the globalfield/merge field idea and made a report based on the related records in list view (displayed in the body) and parent record info in the header and footer.

Now my problem is that there's no way to make this particular report 1 page or less and there's A LOT of info in the header and footer so I get a message saying that the header and(or) footer need to be smaller in order to print. Is there anyway around this???