Page Headers- Phone Dir. Style

[BRochford]

Have to produce a Phone Directory Report. The Client wants Page Headers with Last name Initials of 1st line & last Line on top of each page, (Phone Book type Headers). Any ideas of how to accomplish this?

Page 1
Abbot, Arthur � First name on the page � They want a Header of �A - B�
..
..
..
Baker, Arnold � Last name on the page
Page 2
Baker, David - First name on page 2 - They want a header of �B - D�
..
..
Davis, Edward � last name on page 2

My mind is cluttered with Chad from the Florida ballots and I can�t think of how to produce that kind of headers. Any ideas would be appreciated.

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Page Headers- Phone Dir. Style

Barry,

We're fast becoming an expert on 'chad' here in Sunny Florida, so here's an idea or two for you:

To me this sounds like a problem that will be relatively easy to solve once you figure out how to put a fixed number of 'lines' on each page. There are probably more elegant solutions but a brute force approach would:

1) add a field to your table to hold the line number
2) number each record in the report from 1 to N
3) group your records on line number divided by number of lines you want to put on each page. Break the group if the mod remainder is zero. Begin each group on a new page.

The page header could be the group header. It could contain a variable which is based on the alphabetic 'features' of the current record...

Hope this helps clear out some of the 'chad'. (But please, don't send it down here, we have more than we want or need already!)

-- tom

[BRochford]

RE: Page Headers- Phone Dir. Style

Thanks Tom, but assume 40 lines @ page, I want to print in the header the Initial for record 1 and the initial for record 40. That's where I get hung up. Your thought of adding a consec numnber is good then I assume I would have to have a prepass to put rec 1 initial & rec 40 initial in another field. Remember when I print the header, I havent even read record 40.

-Barry

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Page Headers- Phone Dir. Style

Yes, I see the problem better now.

How about not using consecutive numbers, but instead, how about embedding the desired page header itself in the first 40 records, then change it for the next 40, then change it for the next 40... and so on.

Would require a script to run through the table just before printing, and updates to all records, but would give you something that would be relatively easy to use in your page or group header.

-- tom

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Page Headers- Phone Dir. Style

Pseudo code to embed page header string in first record of each group of 40 records to print on a page:

1) Read current record, extract initial or name
2) Fetch 39 records, in same order as will appear in report
3) Read current record, extract initial or name
4) Create variable for the page header string, combining initials or names
5) Fetch previous 39 times
6) Assign the page header string to a field in the current record
7) Fetch 40 records
8) Repeat steps 1 through 7 until there are no more...

-- tom