Save some rows of a portal as PDF

[Maxime C]

Hi everybody!

I am a kind of new with Filemaker (I am working on since 3 month).

After spending my day to find an answer online, I am getting depressed, so I hope you will be able to help, and thank you for your time.

Here is the context:

I have a form which use a portal (I am displaying records from an other table)

On this portal you can find several fields like date, tester name, serial number, part number...and a check-box SELECT

I would like to let the user to tick the check box he wants (this part of the job is done)

And then press a button which execute a script which save every rows of this portal that have the check boxed ticked AND NOT the other one.

So I am doing a loop which appends to the existing PDF the specified rows (marked by the value of the check-box)

My problem is that with the "save records as PDF" function, it is doing a kind of screenshot of my layout.

It doesn't care about the row's number.

My second problem is that once the save as record is done, the PDF is shrank compared to my real layout.

I really don't know how to get out of this problem, I will be listening to any idea.

Thank you for your time

Maxime

[comment]

There are actually two issues here:

1. How to mark selected child records;

2. How to have another portal show only selected child records.

Re #1, you cannot have a Selected field in the child table - because then one user selecting a record would select it for all other users as well. You need to use a global field in the parent table to store the ID's of the selected records.

Re #2, it's too bad you don't have version 11 with its filtered portals feature. As it is, you'll need to define another relationship between the two tables, using the global field as an extra matchfield.

[Maxime C]

Actually I have no issues to mark the rows I would like to use, all this part of the job is done. So I know which rows I would like to save as PDF thanks to the check-box.

And I am also using the filter portal option because I use FM11 (sorry I forget to update my profile).

Like said, I would like to add ONLY the rows which have been selected to a PDF.

My other problem is that once the PDF is done, the image is apparently cut. Only the 7 first fields are displayed, the following are hiden

Why do I need an other portal?

I don't get it

Thanks for your support

Maxime

[comment]

Why do I need an other portal?

I presume your current portal shows all child records, whether selected or not. If you want your PDF to show a portal with only selected records, you need to have such portal first.

Alternatively, you could use a list layout of the child table and create a found set of selected records only before saving as PDF.

My other problem is that once the PDF is done, the image is apparently cut. Only the 7 first fields are displayed, the following are hiden

Saving records as PDF is similar to printing: check your page setup and make sure the fields you want to include are withing the page bounds.

[Maxime C]

Thank you, I changed the size in print setup, unfortunately I can't customize the size. I have to chose with some existing size like A4, ANSI D...

The result is not awesome, I am thinking to switch to a save record as excel. It looks better this way but is there any way to do a kind of template because when I am using save as excel I just copy the table into the spreadsheet.

Is there anyway to automatically add the name of my company and few information in the excel spreadsheet?

Max

[comment]

Thank you, I changed the size in print setup, unfortunately I can't customize the size. I have to chose with some existing size like A4, ANSI D...

Surely you could produce a decent-looking layout within a A4 (or any other standard size) page?

save record as excel ... is there any way to do a kind of template

I don't want to say it's impossible, but it's certainly not simple.