Avoiding printing empty pages?

[jeskasper]

I have a report that utilizes sliding portals. To make sure that all entries from the related table shows up on the print, I have set it up to show 100 entries in the portal. Now, if there are only 1 entry in the related table, then it slides the enclosing field fine, however, it still prints all the pages that "could" have been filled with data "if" there were 100 occurences. How do I avoid these blank pages being printed?

[IdealData]

I recently helped a report that featured a sliding portal - however in over 13 years FM programming I never used a sliding portal.

The report is (really) being printed from the wrong table - it should be a standard header/body/footer report but printing the records from the related set (the "child" records).

The header/footer can still feature the "parent" info and your report will not suffer from blank pages.

[jeskasper]

Thank you, IdealData, for the reply.

I am not sure if I understand you correctly, and I am not sure if you got me right. I will try to lay it out a bit more informative.

What I have is this;

A company database

A contacts database

A servers database

A company can have many contacts and servers.

A contact can have many servers and be member of many companies.

A server can have many contacts and be owned by many companies.

Now, what I wish to do, is print a documentation for each company.

The report should show the following:

a) The company data in the header, along with print date and page number.

All the contacts related to the company.

c) All the servers owned by the company.

So I made a report based on the records of the company database, and put portals on the report to show contacts and servers. As I dont know how many servers and contacts a company could have, I safe guarded and made the portals show an immense amount of related records, and set the fields to slide. That way, it would slide to show only the actual servers and contacts. My problem now is, that it does slide, but the contacts and server get spaced as on the report layout - i.e. with 100 repetitions apart, thus leaving a lot of blank space in between.

I kind of "hacked" a solution, by placing one portal in the body part, and the other portal in a "Trailing grand summary" part. This accomplished what I want, but it is not pretty and I will have trouble placing a third portal on the report to, f.ex., show the support tickets related to the company.

I hope this clarified the situation, and you are able to help.

Best regards,

Jes Kasper Klittum

Edited January 8, 2009 by Guest