Force a Grand Summary to the Bottom of the Page

[Devyn]

Can a trailing grand summary be forced to appear at the bottom of the printed page it appears on?

The effect I'm after is the tear-away section on the bottom of an invoice that details the relevant payment information for paying the invoice.

thanks in advance

[Devyn]

I may have found a solution. Placing the summary field for "Total Payable" in a Title Footer seems to work.

I'm waiting for it to break as I try some different record combinations and sorting combinations.

Will someone holler if I'm missing some vital point?

[-Queue-]

If all your invoices are only one page each, then that might be a decent solution. If any are multiple pages, it will not be sufficient.

I believe there was a trick for doing this in previous versions, but I'm having difficulty locating an example right now.

Comment, care to 'Qualitify'?

[comment]

More of a hack than a trick:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showpost.php?post/252312/

I don't think there's a significant difference between 6 and the following versions in this regard.

[Devyn]

The solution I mentioned (summary field in a Title Footer) is displaying the correct total even when records span multiple pages. The only limitation (and I don't consider it one, because its what I wanted) is that the "pseudo-summary" must appear on the first page. I haven't tried this method with regular footers, only a Title Footer.

I only have 1 example set of data right now, so I'll have to check again with a new Invoice to be sure.

The Expanding Grand Summary in the linked post looks very usable. One problem comes to mind:

If you have any sliding fields on your report that could potentially occupy multiple "regular height" record rows your number of Carriage returns will be off and the grand summary will either appear with space below it, or on the next page.

[comment]

If you actually want the summary to appear on the first page, then you are in luck. However, you need to be careful, because any data in the Title Footer comes from the last record on the first page. This may not be significant with a simple total, but other types of summaries (such as running total/count, or calculations involving summaries and other fields) may require you to use the GetSummary() function in order to return the correct result for the entire found set.

[Devyn]

I did read in the help that the Title header takes the data for any fields it contains from the last record on the page. I started this post after reading that actually. Then, on a whim I tried throwing the summary field in there and it worked.

So a summary of Total Price =Sum(Invoice Item::Price) is exempt from the last record rule. What's different about the other summary types (running total/count)?

[comment]

So a summary of Total Price =Sum(Invoice Item::Price) is exempt from the last record rule.

No, it's not. And it's not even a summary field, it's a calculation field using an aggregate function. It looks like you're printing from the invoices table, instead of from the line items table. If you are printing more than one invoice, that field is going to show the total of ONE of the first invoice records - which one depends on how many are there on the first page.

It's different with summary fields, because most often a summary field will return the same result for each and every record in the found set. However, if the field is a running total/count, then obviously the result is different for each record - and that's when you don't want your title page to take its data from just any record that happens to be the last one on the first page.

[Devyn]

Sorry, I explained that poorly.

The print layout is based on line items. Line items contains a Summary field (it is a summary field) of Total of Extended Price.

That summary field is in a title footer displaying a correct (has now been checked with three unique sets of Line items on different invoices) value for the invoice total.

[comment]

If you want to see what I meant, place a copy of the summary field in the body, and view it in table view. You'll see it returns the same value for every record. But if you change the field to running total...

So as long as your title part only contains only a simple summary, you should be OK. I just wanted to point out you need to careful if you decide to add some more complex stats to it.

[Devyn]

I just thought of something. Is this working because I'm using no body part? I've used various sub-summary sections which (of course) conditionally display based on the sort criteria.

I didn't want to show all the Invoice Items if the user only wanted to show the client their Work Order totals, or Labour and Material Totals, or just Project Totals. So I deleted the body part. Its really only the summaries of the data that are important for this application.

The user can still display the record data if they want because I've inserted the appropriate fields into sub-summary parts (which then display when sorted by invoice item primary key).

So there are actually NO records on the invoice. Could that be why my Summary field is showing the correct Invoice Total when placed in the Title Footer?

[comment]

No, deleting the body part from the layout has no impact on other parts.

The only thing that matters is which records are in the found set.