Reports in VFP9

[paul1941]

Hello,

I'm building a genealogical program in VFP9. One of the reports is giving the descendance of a given person with text and picture's concerning the person and his descendants. The report is buidlede very quickly but there are big blank zones between the items. How to avoid this?
Can we expect in the future an editable report preview?

Regards,

Paul Vandewalle

 

[craigber]

What do you mean by blank zones? Blank lines or columns?

VFP 9.0 uses GDI+ for report preview. There are no plans to change this to an editable preview.

Craig Berntson
MCSD, Visual FoxPro MVP,

http://www.craigberntson.com

Author, CrysDev: A Developer's Guide to Integrating Crystal Reports"

 

[paul1941]

Hello Craig,


I give you an example:
Father x Mother
Childs:
1. John
2. Mary
3. Elisabeth

Between the names of the children there are sometimes 4 tot 5 cm of blank space. And there is no system in it!!!

If you want I send you a report so you can try it out

regards, Paul

 

[Mike Gagnon]

Paul,

If there are "blank zones" that would indicate that either your detail band uses up too much space between records, or that you actually have a blank record somewhere in your child table.

Mike Gagnon

If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ184-2483 first.
ReFox XI (www.mcrgsoftware.com)

 

[JRB-Bldr]

As Mike has pointed out above, rather than wishing that you could edit the Report, you should examine how the data is gathered prior to sending it to the Report.

If the data has blank records, you will most likely be 'reporting' them.

The other possibility is to use the Report Text Box Option Print When to control if the detail value is displayed (or not).

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[Mike Lewis]

There's also an option (on the Print When tab of the properties dialogue) to "Remove line if blank". This will suppress an entire line if all the objects on the line happen to have blank values.

Mike


__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk

 

[paul1941]

Hello all,

'Remove line if blank' and "Print when" statements are helping a lot, but for an unexpectable reason some blank zones persist.
In my table I removed all hard returns at the end of the text lines or memofields.
An example:

Father
1 John
born 1.1.2000

2 Suzan
born 15.9.2001
3. Bill
born 18.3.2003

There is no explication for the blank line between John and Suzan!!

Any help?

Regards, Paul

 

[Mike Gagnon]

There is no explication for the blank line between John and Suzan!!

Have you browse the table that contains these records just before issuing your report? Do you see blank records?

Mike Gagnon

If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ184-2483 first.
ReFox XI (www.mcrgsoftware.com)

 

[paul1941]

Hello Mike,

I browsed the table, there are 21 records, no one is empty,I controlled the memofields.
It is allways after the first child that there is a blank line, or a blank zone if the person is print in the lower ththird quarter of the page.

Regards, Paul

 

[JRB-Bldr]

I am assuming, since you mention 'child', that you are reporting on 2 or more related tables.

I have found that unless I use an SQL query to accumulate ALL of the data (parent AND child) into a single temporary table/cursor to send to the REPORT FORM (my first choice), that I often have to set up a 'reverse' relation in order to print ALL records.

By 'reverse' relation I mean that the 'child' table has to become the Parent and the original 'parent' has to become the 'child'. In that way the Report can see ALL of the child records and will ignore those situations where there is no record.

From that point I then use REPORT GROUP's to control the display.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[Imaginecorp]

I browsed the table, there are 21 records, no one is empty

No deleted Records? If so in Report, set Deleted On

 

[mikeopolo]

Another rason might be that you have long text, and the text box is not set to stretch.
Regards
MIke

 

[Kruno]

I experienced your report behaviour converting my DOS reports (FRX) to VFP.

In some intensive grouping reports there were some blank rows between data. Not regular row height, but in pixels. Very nasty. I suspected in correlation of amount of data processed (but covered by grouping).

My solution:
I created new report from scratch, copy/paste field by field and problem solved.

Hope this helps for you too.

Kruno Malovic

 

[dbMark]

In case the solutions offered above do not help, I wonder if you are using text boxes where Stretch with Overflow is enabled beside ActiveX (OLE) graphics controls?

If so, see more details in thread1252-984387 where I never found a solution to such situations where the band was forced to be overlong. Basically the report writer was unable to correctly calculate how long the band had to be for two side-by-side objects as described above.