LONG body on form - page break cutting fields in half

Classic Servoy
1

We have a long form (2 pages is all though) that I can’t seem to get a page break in the right place, or even to break without cutting fields in half!

Parts include:

Title Header
Body
Footer

The body is approx. 2 pages, with some print sliding due to variable text.

This is ONE RECORD per print only, so there is not a multiple record issue.

No matter where the end of page 1 ends up, the fields are cut off.

I’ve tried to set page breaks, move half the form onto the title header, BREAK BEFORE on the BODY part, or BREAK AFTER 1 OCCURANCE on the Title Header, and neither force page breaks.

Regardless of where the page is breaking, I’m always getting cut off fields - regular fields, html, text_area, it doesn’t seem to matter.

There are no overlaps or errors/alerts during page preview. The page preview shows the cut-off fields exactly as they print.

This is the first multi-page single record form I’ve created (others are multi-page, but also multi-record so breaks can be managed easier with parts).

Is it normal servoy printing behavior to cut fields in half if the body is longer than one page?

Is there ANY way to FORCE a page break at any point on a form?

Why do the PageBreakBefore and PageBreakAfterOccurance properties not seem to do anything for TITLE HEADER and BODY parts?

My assumption would be if PageBreakBefore was checked for the BODY , the report would print everything till the body…then page break…the print the body, but it does not do this.

Are these properties ONLY good for multiple record printing and summary parts?

Thanks for any further information or insight.

Nolan M.
FSCI

PS, I can forward a pdf print of the form in question to servoy support if you care to have it, just didn’t want to post it here as its an official document that I have test data in.

2

please file a support case with small sample solution at:
http://crm.servoy.com/servoy-webclient/ … oy_support

3

Nolan,

i have been through similar issues while trying to produce a text based report.

This shouldnt be happening with normal text fields or html fields.

What i have done is built a title page for the front cover of my report and then put a very long html field stretching down my layout.

Into this field i create the text i want to produce from text area fields in my database (dont try putting html fields into another, it get complicated!!!).

So i have a report create script which essentially creates an html document formatting titles with bold and using line breaks etc.

What you have to look out for though is getting too clever. If you use an html table within your document then you will find that single line rows work ok, but if you put text into a row that uses a few lines it will then get messed up across the bottom of a page. So try to avoid them unless you are just trying to format some basic one line table with rows.

I have a fixed final page with a signature on, so i use a grand summary to force the page break before this page.

This approach works quite well for me and you certainly avoid the text splitting across the end of the page (an old filemaker issue!!!)

I am thinking that with a fixed page length their may be some sort of algorithm i could build into my output html creation method to create a pseudo widow/orphan approach. This needs experimenting with, i suppose it may get messed up certainly if some text is a larger font in the document, but i was thinking if one uses an identical font size then bold might not affect the line spacing and therefore you could work out where the page breaks were and create a way to put extra line feeds before paragraphs that need to be kept together.

I will let you know if i progress this.

Good Luck

David

4

dpearce,

Thank you for your information.

I’ve thought about creating it in HTML, but as its a formal document, we then lose some of the finer grained control of placing fields where required.

I do have some of the text labels set up with HTML inside…including a few tables to format the text as desired (2-3 rows, 2 columns). I can try to eliminate some of these to see if its the multi-row tables that are throwing the page break off.

A final resort will be to create two forms, one for page 1, one for page 2, and offer enough of a buffer on the end to account for our print sliding.

Servoy Support - any word on the sample I submitted? Are you able to reproduce this?

Thanks,

Nolan
FSCI

5

Will be fixed in Servoy 3.1.5

6

Tried the same forms on 3.1.6, and it works great.

There are no longer fields that are cut in half on a multi-page form (at least on my forms!).

Thanks Servoy!

NCM
FSCI

7

Just wanted to follow up -

We migrated to 3.5.1 from 3.1.x and have to say:

Thanks dev team, the printing is MUCH improved. Print sliding is great and seems to work well with all field / label types.

Noted that with labels, HTML seems to work best with DISPLAY TAGS set.

Thanks for the work…

NCM
FSCI