Complex Reporting Requirement

Question

I have four reports that need to run in sequence; Parameters are supplied to the first report and then passed to the second, second passes to third and on.... I've tried using the srw.run_report but get a runtime error after the first report runs and no subsequent reports are produced. I have this call in the after report trigger. I need all these reports, in sequence, to write/append to the same print file. These are to be high quality, published books. Also, I notice when generating output to different formats, pdf, eps, html etc. that the cell borders skew badly - only when I print direct from reports do the lines format correctly. I use centimeters for the layout and have 200 snaps per cm. Are there standard ruler settings that will allow consistent formatting when generating various types of print files.

Answer 1

I need all these reports, in sequence, to write/append to the same print file. Since you're creating high quality, published books, the only output formats that would be applicable are Postscript/PCL & PDF output. Unfortunately, Reports doesn't allow you to write/append the output from multiple reports to a single file with these outputs. (It actually doesn't allow you on any output but you can workaround the issues with other formats such as HTML).
Since Reports doesn't support your current architecture, it seems that you need to change how you're running your reports. I don't know why you have 4 separate reports but I'm guessing it's because you have 4 page style layouts that you couldn't fit into 1 layout report page(?)
If this is the case, you can actually have layouts objects that extends vertically beyond the page boundary. You just need to make sure that they will end up within the page boundary when they are printed. You aren't restricted to the physical page size when designing the report, only when running it.
In your case, you can combine each of your layouts into a single Report one after the other. Then place a frame around each of the 4 page layouts and make sure their vertical sizing is variable. (Also make sure the frames are beneath all the other objects using the "send to back" option).
What you're doing is creating an implicit anchor between these variable sized frames. When the first frame finishes printing, the other frames will move up to where the first frame was.
The above method will allow you to keep everything in a single report and produce your combined output. You can also turn on/off the frames using format triggers if you want to run any of the layouts individually.