Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

[Vince McGinnis]

Hello Everyone,

I would like to ask for someone to please look at the attached report and tell me why the detail section is not shrinking.

I tried (I think) everything.

The region and all the fields' shrink properties are set.

I even put all the fields on an RTF Object, that didn't help either.

If someone could tell me what's wrong, I sure would be thankful. I've spent about 5-6 hours looking at this.

Thanks

[Al Buchholz]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Vince

Looks to me like the borders are causing the problem along with having the detail regions field's height fairly large. Having the border causes the field to 'lock' to the hieght that you have specified.

Putting fields on top of an rtf doesn't change the way they format. You need to darg and drop the field into the rtf from the drag and drop menu.

I put a few examples of how you can change the report. Most with the rtf concept, but having individual rtf's for each field to keep the column spacing.

Taking the border off or not having a vertical line takes most of the white space out.

[Vince McGinnis]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Al,

Thank you very much for looking at this! I appreciate you time very much. Your reply got me looking into another direction.

I think you're right about the borders causing all the trouble.

My problem is that I absolutely must have the row and columns lines, and they must automatically adjust to the tallest field object.

I need to make it look exactly like a Word table or an Excel worksheet or I can't use Alpha Five for this project.

Perhaps there is a way using Xbasic where I can:

a. store the border height of the "Key Event Description" field or whichever field is the tallest for a given record.
b. then set the border height of all the other report fields objects to match, causing the border lines to match up.

Anyway that the direction I'm heading for now.

Thanks again.

[Selwyn Rabins]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

vince

xbasic include commands for writing directly to the printer. this allows you to write xbasic scripts that position text and lines at exact locations on the screen.

these features are not advertised and are not documented ( no one can get mad at us if we don't document and a feature that is not advertised, right? )

in any event, i will attach some sample scripts that demonstrate the features. in effect, the features are like an Xbasic version of postscript.

[Selwyn Rabins]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me








New Page 1







lmargin = .5
tmargin = 1

'to load a bitmap from a
file so that the bitmap can be printed:
bitmapfile = "C:\A5 Install CD Maker\a5v5\install_bitmaps\adhocview.bmp"
bddata = file.to_blob(bitmapfile)
ui_bitmap_load("tempbitmap",bddata)

word_wrap_text = ""%a%
This is an example of how we can do word wrap text on the page. Alpha Five gives
you fantastic control over every aspect of how you output text to the printer.
%a%

page_description = ""%code%
'this tell me how big the page is in inches
page_width = extent_width()
page_height = extent_height()

'set the font for the next piece of text we write
set_font("Arial,24,B")
'output some text
text = "Alpha Software Inc."

'left alligment means that the text object has its top left bounding box as the
specified co-ordinate
'other options for aligment are
'right, center, left-top, right-top, bottom-left, left-center etc. and rotate
(used with set_rotate())
text(text,2,3,"Left")

'measure the width and height of the last text we wrote
w = text_width(text)
h = text_height(text)

'draw a line under this text
'set the brush color, which determines the fill for the box
set_brush("red")
inner_rect(2,3 + h,w,.1)

'using this would have put a black line around the box
'fill_rect(2,3 + h,w,.1)

'now put a bitmap at 1,1 inches

bitmap("a5_a5icon32",1,1,1,1)

bitmap("tempbitmap",6,6,2,3)

'pen styles are dot and dash or blank for a solid line
set_pen("green","dot",30)
line(3,2,5,2.5)
'now lets put some slanted text
text = "This is to cool for words"
set_origin(3,3)
set_rotate(-45)
set_font("arial,10")
text(text,0,0,"rotate")
set_rotate(0)
set_origin(0,0)
set_pen("black","",1)
line(1,1,8,1)
line(1,2,8,2)
'only need this if you want to print more than one page
'new_page()
'now i want to put something in the exact enter of the page
set_origin(page_width/2, page_height/2)
text("In THE CENTER",0,0,"CENTER")
set_origin(0,0)
'offset
h = wrap_text_height(word_wrap_text,2)
offset = draw_wrap_text(word_wrap_text,2,6,3,h)
%code%


'since i don't want to
waste paper checking how it prints every time i run the script
'i use acrobat distiller. if you don't have distiller and you want to print to a
printer,
'change the code to use your printer name, and instead of specifying a filename
for the output
'leave it blank

printer = "Acrobat Distiller"
program_name = "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 4.0\Distillr\AcroDist.exe"
ui_printer_draw(printer,"please wait","c:\distiller.ps",page_description)
if file.exists("c:\distiller.pdf") then
file.remove("c:\distiller.pdf")
end if
cmd = program_name + " c:\distiller.ps"
sys_shell(cmd)

wait_until(file.exists("c:\distiller.pdf"),1,10)

sys_open("c:\distiller.pdf")




this xbasic script produces this output:

[Vince McGinnis]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Selwyn,

Thank you very much! I'll study the sample and test some things out.

Since I'm using borders for the row and column lines, I think I can set all the field heights for a particular report line to match the tallest for that line.

That way I can give the same look of setting the "shrink" property, and all the lines will still match up.

Thanks again!

[Vince McGinnis]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

I'm not having any success with this report.

Has anyone been able to override the report layout (field)properties using xbasic?

What I'm trying to do is:

Set the all the Fields Height and Borders with Xbasic (on the OnArrive event for each field), simulating a "Word table" look.

Using the standard A5 report layout, I can create the "Word Table" look. But I can't get the Detail Region to "Shrink" and "Grow", if I set the field height and border properties in the report layout (field properties).

So I thought if I could just take control of these properties using xbasic, that might solve my problem.

So, I quess my main question is:

Has anyone been able to override a report layout's field properties (height and borders) using xbasic.

So far, it seems that this is not possible.

Perhaps the only way is to do everything from scratch using xbasic, like Selwyn demonstrated.

Thanks for any help.

[Selwyn Rabins]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

you can't change the display properties of an object on a report using xbasic.

there are very good reasons for this and i will be happy to discuss them with your at the conference.

[Vince McGinnis]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Thanks Selwyn, at least I won't spend any more time going down this path.

[Jim Chapman]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Hello Selwyn,

I'm having trouble getting a simple ui_printer_draw() function to work. I don't have distiller and in comparing the popup help with your example I'm getting confused. The second parameter in your example appears to be a message to the user. However in the context help, the second parameter is 'c output_file".

Can you give me a very simple example. For instance, what is wrong with the following:



ui_printer_draw("NEC SuperScript 1400 Series","This is a test","c:\atestPrint.prn","This is the content")


Thanks,
Jim

[Thomas Henkel]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Vince,

WOuld you be better off laying things out in Word or excel, and just DDE your fields into the document?? We have a newsletter that we print every month, and to format it with Alpha would be a nightmare. We use word with bookmarks where we want to place the data, and then just "DDE Poke" the information from our table out to the document and then force the print. Since we produce over 6000 2-sided newsletters each month, this proves to be a very efficient method. It is all fired from a script.

If you would like, I wil e-mail the script to you.

Tom

[Daryl Grace]

RE: Detail Region Not Shrinking For Me

Vince,
What if you put them in Rich Text and made them small. Choose allow growth when printing. Just an idea you may have already tried thought of.

Daryl