Getting a report to print pages consecutively.

Question

I am working on an 18 page Vendor Application questionnaire in Report Builder 6.0.5.35.0 and am having trouble getting the paging to work the way I want.
The layout consists primarily of boilerplate questions which use the &column_name syntax to bind previously supplied answers as lexical variables, which the vendor then reviews and corrects. These questions are individual boilerplate items placed in eighteen frames, with each frame enclosed in its own repeating frame that has as its source the vendor group in the Data Model. It was originally built this way because if you have just one R-Frame and boilerplate frames that are larger than one panel you get error REP-1814 " Object 'vertically' can never fit within 'M_21' ".
The problem is that when you print out questionnaires for 40 vendors all of the page ones are printed, then all the page twos, etc. This situation necessitates a lot of collation that I'd like to avoid by having all pages print for the first vendor, then all for the second vendor, and so on.
Can anyone suggest alternative methods?
Many thanks,
Ken Nellis

Answer 1

It was originally built this way because if you have just one R-Frame
and boilerplate frames that are larger than one panel you get error
REP-1814 " Object 'vertically' can never fit within 'M_21' ". Actually, you had it right the first time until you hit the above error. To do what you want, you need to just that - have one repeating frame that surrounds all eighteen frames so that you execute all eighteen frames for each instance of the repeating frame.
I'm assuming you were hitting the above error, not because "M_21" was larger than one panel but because, when it came to print, it was positioned outside of the panel. This has to do with how the anchoring works. Unless an object is beneath another object that either expands or contracts, then it will be anchored to the top left hand corner of the page. ie: the distance between it and the top left hand corner won't change.
You managed to get around this problem with repeating frames since they implicitly expand and hence all objects underneath them are anchored to the frame above it and not the page.
To do what you want:
- replace all your repeating frames with group frames
- set the "vertical elasticity" property to "variable" on each group frame
- create one repeating frame that surrounds everything
- set the "vertical elasticity" property to "variable" on the repeating frame
- Run the report.
You might just like to try this first using frames the same size as your pages and then start adding the content to see it working.
Note: If you also have a requirement to fix the size of each frame, you can still have another fixed sized group frame within the variable sized group frame. The above will still work since an implicit collapsing anchor is created between each variable size frame regardless of what is inside of it.