Display the horizontal lines whether or not a section is empty.

Question

I am using CR with vb.net 2010 and latest version of CR for net 2010.  I want to print a report like a grid which means horizontal and vertical lines appearing whether or not there is text in a section.
I have a box surrounding the report and vertical lines extending down the report.  There are two group headers and a details section.    The horizontal lines only appear when there are values in the group or details sections.  Thus, once the detail lines end (and therefore there are no more groups either) on a page, the horizontal lines stop though the vertical ones continue.  I want the horizontal  lines in the sections to continue as well  -- just like in Excel.
There is a page break for the top group so there are lots of pages that have detail lines empty.  How do I print horizontal lines in those sections as well when there are no values.

Answer 1

hi Suzanne,
there are several different ways of doing this.
1) the easiest way of doing this is to create a new Page Header that contains all of the lines. this works if you've got a report that is static in way that each page is laid out. make the new page header the size of a page in length, move it up so that it is Page Header A, and go to the section expert and set it to Underlay Following Sections. now add the grid lines to this new page header A.
2) another way of doing this is to create a whole bunch of Details sections....e.g B to Z. put lines in these sections. write a conditional suppression formula for each one based on how many records there are in a group. this is way more work.
3) another fairly easy way is to create a formula that outputs the horizontal lines...i.e.
     numbervar N:= 10;
     // you'd need to figure out what N is based on the number of existing records and the number of lines you want
     replicatestring(replicatestring("_",300) + chr(10), N)
make sure that you right click on the formula and go to Format Field > Common tab, and set it to Can Grow.
-jamie