I have FM5, Mac. I have a 4 page layout with 16 boxes containing 5 fields of patient prescription information. Not all patients have meds enough to fill out the entire 4 pages. I want to avoid printing four pages for all 400 patients, many pages would be blank.

Any help?

Make sure you have the med info inside a repeating field. Then set your sliding/printing to 'slide up based on all above' for that med field and also for whatever is below it (footer type info). This will automatically collapse the med field to just print rows that have information in them.

Cael.

Hey thanks Cael. Sounds like that will work. I appreciate your quick reply. Mark

Cael (or any other FM5 wiz):

Your suggestion worked very well one of my layouts. That layout has no graphics, just text fields. My second layout tracks when meds are given. It has a series of check boxes to track time and date. The check boxes are a graphic. I can't figure out how to treat the graphic in a similar way to the repeating text.

So the question is: How can I craft the layout so that only the graphics with associated filled text fields print?

Seems like a tough one to me.

Mark

If each graphic (in a container field) has an associated text field, you can create a calculated graphics field and make the calculated field blank if the associated text field is empty.

CalcGraphic (calculation, container) =

If(IsEmpty(TextField), "", GraphicField)

-bd

bd:

Thanks a million for the suggestion. Though thoroughly intimidated by scripts, I'll give it a go!

Mark

Go back a few steps...

Don't use repeating fields. Never. Use a portal instead, it's much more flexible.

The way to remove excess space is to usde the sliding/printing feature. This allows FMP to make the field or enclosing part shrink-fit to the text.

Vaughan

I tried to add a portal but one of the fields is a container field and apparently FMP won't allow that kind of relationship. Any ideas?

bd:

How do I "associate" the text field with the graphic container field?

Mark

Err, I dunnno why you'd want to relate to a container field!

Vaughan:

Right. Who needs container fields when there are cats and dogs out there. Much better companions. I found some tedious work around my problem. A clunky solution, but a solution nonetheless. Thanks for your help

What I meant was this: say I have a db of people, each record has staffID, name, etc, and an photo in a container field.

If I wanted to make a relationship to get the photo, I'd make the relationship on StaffID or another text or number field, not the container field (cannot do it anyway). So build the relationship on StaffID, then bring the container field across through the relationship.

Moved topic..