Alert end user of Legal Sized paper

[jenschmidt]

This question relates to reports published to Crystal Enterprise v9.
We are using Crystal Reports v9 to design the report.

The majority of our reports are written on standard 8.5 X 11 (letter) paper. There are a few reports, however, that we've had to expand to 11 X 14 (legal) paper.

Is there a way to alert the user that the report is formatted for legal paper without printing it on the report?

Some of the ideas we've had:
* A formula/text field that shows up when they view the report, but is suppressed during print time. (I couldn't find any function/operator that had specifically to do with print time.)

* Use a generic Alert that gets triggered every time the report runs which displays a message saying "print on legal". (When published to the web, the alerts are a separate area to click on, not displayed within the report on viewing.)

* As a very last resort, since the report title you see in ePortfolio is the file name and the title you see inside the report is the special field Report Title from Summary Info, we could put "print on legal" to the file name and not into Summary Info. While this works, our reports titles are already long enough that users are complaining and we don't really want to add any more information in that area.

Any additional ideas? Can anyone make our first idea work?

Thanks!

jennifer.giemza@uwmf.wisc.edu

 

[KingfisherINC]

How about a parameter?

Kingfisher

 

[jenschmidt]

Thanks for the idea! What are you thinking I should do with a parameter?

jennifer.giemza@uwmf.wisc.edu

 

[KingfisherINC]

I was just thinking it's a [kludgy] way of popping up a message that won't get printed. The parameter would not actually "do" anything.

Something like:
Name: Legal Paper
Prompting Text: "This Report is formatted for Legal Paper size"
Value Type: Boolean
Default Value: True
Description: Legal Paper
Value: False
Description: Legal Paper

Kingfisher

 

[KingfisherINC]

...Obviously you'd need to check the option "Prompt the user for new values(s) when viewing" option in CMC.

Kingfisher

 

[jenschmidt]

Unfortunately, the same happens with a parameter as an alert on ePortfolio - it doesn't pop up anymore. It is a good idea - I just don't think the end user will go to the parameters section if they don't have to and then they wouldn't see the note. (Unless, if you know a fairly easy way to default to the parameters screen. What I mean is, when the end user clicks on Schedule, if it would go to Parameters right away instead of Schedule, that might work.)

jennifer.giemza@uwmf.wisc.edu

 

[KingfisherINC]

Oh, I thought you were talking about Viewing.

If you're scheduling can't you just set "Print in Crystal Reports format using the selected printer when scheduling." and then configure the print settings "Set the report's page layout." > "Custom Settings" > Paper Size = Legal

If this still does not give you what you need, I think you're looking at custom code.

BTW I don't like how it does not default to parameters page when you have to enter them either.

Kingfisher