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[Gary C.]

Hi

I have a requirement to generate a report that is causing me much head scratching and I would welcome any suggestions as to how to approach it.

We have a quotation system and a quote can include one or more products. Each product may have associated records relating to the EN standards it complies with, key dimensional measurements, illustrative images etc.

The desired output report is a covering letter which summarises all of the products and their cost. Then for each product a series of pages is required showing the product in more detail including the additional information.

To date I have been trying to use sub reports and have got each element working, i.e. a report that can generate the covering letter, one that details the standards etc. These all work as stand alone reports but I am struggling to put the pieces together.

I am not even sure if the attached code extract is valid, i.e. can you start and stop sub reports from within a loop?

I'm not sure how much sense the above makes but any pointers would be welcome.

Thanks

Gary

[Alex G.]

Hi,
the approach using sub reports is fine if you plan to run the reports p1a_quotation, p1b_quotationlinesummary, p1c_quotationlinestandards and p1d_quotationlinesizechart also as standalone reports or as sub reports of other reports.
If they are used only for this report then I would prefer printing the data directly in the main report. That way you have only one report, one design file and you can see the whole design at one glance in the report designer.
>The desired output report is a covering letter which summarizes all of the products and their cost. Then for each product a series of pages is required showing the product in more detail including the additional information.
The solution you have chosen (looping over the data twice) seems fine to me (If you don't mind the fact that the data can have changed between the first and the second loop).
You can replace the sub reports p1b_quotationlinesummary, p1c_quotationlinestandards and p1d_quotationlinesizechart which have identical arguments by a single "PRINT qthd.*, qtln.*". In the design you can then print three sections from that information and use the variable content several times. Unlike the duplicated list, there is no need to ship the variable values more than once in this case.
>I am not even sure if the attached code extract is valid, i.e. can you start and stop sub reports from within a loop?
I didn't test but the code looks valid to me but as said I would replace all "START REPORT", "OUTPUT TO REPORT xyz" and "FINISH REPORT"s by "PRINT xyz".
Regards,
Alex

[Gary C.]

Hi Alex

Thanks for the reply. You pointed me in the right direction and I've managed to get there now with no sub reports.

On another note, within this report the product images need to be printed landscape (one image per page). What is the best approach for changing the page orientation part way through a report?

Thanks

Gary

[Alex G.]

Hi Gary,
thanks for the feedback, glad you got it working.
>On another note, within this report the product images need to be printed landscape (one image per page). What is the best approach for changing the page orientation part way through a report?
If it is just the image that needs to be turned than you can change the "Layout Direction" property of the IMAGEBOX. If you want to change the orientation of an entire page or a larger document fragment then,  in addition to changing the "Layout Direction" of the root node, set the "Transform Transparently" property on that node.
Regards,
Alex

[Gary C.]

Hi Alex

Thanks for that. What you described certainly allowed me to rotate the objects on the page very easily. However, my users will view and share this report as a PDF document and as the page itself is still in portrait mode, when viewing the PDF the images look rotated and are difficult to view.

Is it possible to actually rotate a page within a report from portrait to landscape as opposed to rotating the objects on the page?

Thanks for your help with this.

Gary

[Alex G.]

Hi Gary,
>Is it possible to actually rotate a page within a report from portrait to landscape as opposed to rotating the objects on the page?
We support that only in the image output device at this moment. If the page size changes from page to page then the resulting images can be made to have that size via the API call "fgl_report_setImageShrinkImagesToPageContent(value BOOLEAN)".
It certainly makes sense to add that option for PDF output and our SVG viewer. I will see that we have a RFE registered for that.
Regards,
Alex
 

[Gary C.]

Hi

Did the RFE ever get lodged?

It certainly makes sense to add that option for PDF output and our SVG viewer. I will see that we have a RFE registered for that.

The ability to generate a PDF with a mixture of page orientations would alleviate a number of issues and user frustrations for us.

Gary

[Romain W.]

Hi Gary,
This is filed as feature request #GRE-643 (Get the ability to display portrait and landscape pages in the same report).
Best regards,
Romain W.