Showing different formats on a line of a .frx report 1

[AndrewMozley]

I am producing a report from a table tDetail, which has (among others) two fields : tDesc C(40) and tFormat N(1).

The tFormat field determines the way in which the tDesc field should be displayed; for example a value of 0 might be left aligned, 10 pt Arial, and a value of 1 might be 12 pt Arial bold, centered. There might be perhaps 5 or 6 formats, at the user’s discretion. The .frx file will then print the field in the format selected.

One way of handling this in the .frx file is to make use of the ‘Print When’ option on a field in the .frx file.

However since the various options would be alternatives for the same space in the final report, the layout of the form during the design is rather cluttered, with the fields overlapping. Is there a way of organising the design so that you can see each of the options, without having to drag them and then having to reposition them?

Thank you.

 

[TamarGranor]

If you're using VFP 9 SP2, you can use the Dynamics tab that was added. It lets you set up as many different formatting styles as you want. I wrote a little about how this works in this paper:

http://www.tomorrowssolutionsllc.com/Conference Sessions/VFP Tips and Tricks.pdf

Just search the page for "Dynamics"

Tamar

 

[AndrewMozley]

Thank you very much, Tamar. I am checking that out. Andrew

 

[Mike Lewis]

Andrew,

Is your main concern that, if a field is given a larger point size, the text will be wider, and therefore might either get truncated or will overlap the next field?

If so, one option would be to set the field's "Stretch with overflow". That way, the text will wrap over multiple lines, while still maintaining the same width.

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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[AndrewMozley]

Thanks Mike. Point taken. In fact I am producing invoices for a client where there is a fair amount of descriptive stuff.

Only a few lines are in the form <Description> <Qty> <Unit Price> <Line value>. Quite a few lines have effectively 2 columns, which say things like :

Author <Tab> Name of author
Number of pages <Tab> # of pages
Edited between dates <Tab> Range of dates

I don't intend to provide a complete Word Processor (!) but wanted to provide some help in laying out the invoice to get close to the existing style. In this latter case I let the user enter the description with a vertical bar to separate the two columns. I then parse that into two separate fields in the cursor, before presenting this to the .frx file.