Fixed size forms and continuations

erjablow

My project needs to present form data in PDF for printing, and it has some odd requirements for its first page. The first page consists of five sections, each of which has a fixed size. Some of the data in these sections are free-format; the user could have entered more data than the section will hold. If the user has more text than the section can hold, we want the form to cut off the user's text, and repeat the section on the second page without size constraints. It would look something like

Section One

Section Two

Section Three
Comment:
This is line 1 of 5.
This is line 2 of 5.
This is line 3 of 5.
This is line 4 of 5. (continued)

Section Four

Section Five

-- (new page) --

Section Two (continued)

(continued from page 1)
This is line 5 of 5.

---

Currently, we construct a report design by hand in our Java application, and add sections for the continuation to the eventual design. Is there any way to do this in a fixed rptDesign file? Would we have to use event handling, and is that powerful ebnough to base its continuation logic on the actual size of the user's text?

Respectfully,
Eric Jablow

mwilliams

Hi Eric,

Have you found a way to do this? You may be able to use preset limits of characters in a given comment to do this? You'd have to store the remaining characters of the comment string in a variable to display later on. I don't think that BIRT can do this based off of the size of text alone. I could be wrong though. Having a fixed number of sections would be very helpful in this as well, this way you could use static names for all of the possible variables.