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bill printing in pdf

NitinC

Hi All,

I have format of the bill as follows:

Heading contains logo - kept in body-grid-row
heading contains columns like description, qty - kept in body-table-header-row
details contains data - kept in body-table-detail-row
footer contains total, discount, tax, terms and condition, sign etc - kept in body-table-footer-row

Now, I need,
1. footer always at bottom of the last page.
2. fill the table if it contains less rows.
3. closing box line at the end of page, if it is not last page.

I tried it but it does not work all time

page break problems and table does not stretch to fill it all. please see the attached pic.

I am using swing to print bill in pdf using eclipse in birt version 2.5.2.

Please guide me to design such a bill.

Thanks.

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Comments

mwilliams

Can you try attaching the picture again? I don't see it.

NitinC

oh ! forgot to click attach this file!
sorry here it is

Thanks

mwilliams

So, can you only fit a fixed amount of detail rows in a given page? Or do their line heights vary?

NitinC

row height can vary. if text in description is big or contains linefeed, it wraps to next line.
I have set manual page breaks if required after filler row.
It would be great if I somehow know to calculate exact or near exact height of filler row.

mwilliams

You could extend the table by adding extra footer rows and hiding them based on how many rows you've used so far on a page. With varying line heights, you get into unknown line totals, so you'd have to have some way to calculate the number of actual lines used rather than counting the number of rows. You could also extend your table with a html text element in the footer that pushes the footer to the bottom, but with varying line heights, you'd run into the same issue needing to be able to calculate how many lines you've used up so far. As for the line crossing at the bottom of the page unless it's the last page, where that's already taken care of, you'd have the same issue. You could calculate your lines and manually page break and add a border in script on that last line before you force the page break. Multi-line rows definitely throw a twist in.

NitinC

Thank you very much for your detail response.

I am trying to implement your ideas, meanwhile a question

As required to print "Page x" on 2nd page onwards on top of page and "Page x of y" at bottom of pages except last page, I have implemented this in master header in master footer but alignment was not easy to perfect so I took advice from this :
http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/devshare/designing-birt-reports/1159-simple-page-n-of-m/
But it always prints as "Page 1 of 1" and "Page 2 of 2" etc !!

To avoid printing footer "Page x of y" on last footer I tried to hide in onRender as :
if (pageNumber == totalPage)
{
this.getStyle().display = "NONE";
}
but is not working !

Thanks again.

mwilliams

If you run your report in the web viewer, does the page numbering work correctly? If so, run it in the web viewer and then use the export button to export it to PDF and see if it is still correct there. This will be what your report will look like if you deploy the web viewer to Tomcat or another app server and use a URL to access your report design. You'll be able to skip the export step by using the format=pdf URL paramter, so don't worry about that.

NitinC

Sorry, I forgot to mention I run report from swing client (not in browser) as follows:
task = engine.createRunAndRenderTask(iReportRunnable)
PDFRenderOption options = new PDFRenderOption();
options.setOutputStream(fos);
options.setOutputFormat(IRenderOption.OUTPUT_FORMAT_PDF);
task.setRenderOption(options)

mwilliams

The issue is the use of the RunAndRender task vs using the tasks separately, I believe.

mwilliams

Here's an old post on eclipse.org showing the separate tasks:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Separate_Run_and_Render_(BIRT)_2.1

NitinC

Thank you very much for the link. I tried but no success.
In my opinion, These are the common requirements for any corporate printing (letters/bill/other docs)

BIRT is excellent but offers no solution / very hard manual scripting which may not work consistently.
It would be essential to have BIRT support following for the PDF rendering:

1. Option for table to fill the page (and close the border line if any).
2. Smart page break, page with footer must have atleast one record.
3. Smart filling, fit as many records in page with and without footer.
4. Option to show master footer only on last page.
5. update totalPage value for runandrender and runthenrender.

As report engine and its developers knows it better, I and many more developers and their users would be happy to have these options soon in coming version/updates.

For now, I am fine tuning my scripts and calculations knowing it breaks in some situation or other.
please let me know if any other free report designer offers these.

Thanks again for your help.

mwilliams

Could you try upgrading to BIRT 2.6.2? There have been some improvements in page breaking, etc in there from 2.5.2. You might give it a try.

mwilliams

Also, filing bugs and requesting enhancements is one way to push the BIRT project in a direction that will be helpful to those who use it. You can do both at http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/resources/bug-reporting/

NitinC

I am implementing other report and features. I will upgrade to 2.6.2 soon.

Please let me know if there is a way to access value of the field of next record of the table data. I need to count the number of lines in advance for description field of "next" record so that i can page break early if required. I tried and searched the forum.

possibly something like following ?:
dataSetRow[counter, "FIELD_NAME"] or reportcontext.table.getRow(counter).getValue("FIELD_NAME")

Thanks

mwilliams

I think there's an example in this thread that does what you're saying. I did it when I thought this person was wanting to NOT split a multi-line row over two pages and still push the page to the bottom:

http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/forum/index.php/topic/21701-table-not-fitting-to-page/

What I did was check the current line for if it would push past my page's line limit. If it did, I set the pageBreakBefore option. This is similar to "checking the next line value". Hope this helps.

NitinC

Hi !
I have applied changes reading entire topic of the link and checked your sample report there.
However when I apply pageBreakBefore="Always" conditionally ofcource, I do not have chance to fill the rest of page with box lines !
If I can get next record somehow, I can count lines in next record and apply height of filler row.
Thanks alot.

mwilliams

In one of the examples in that thread, I used 2 detail rows. The first had the filler row in it so I could check the current row set my extension and page break before the second detail row if needed.

rkadlec

Hello!
How can I hide some report element (i.e. grid column) during printing in html?
I will not hide it during showing as html in the browser.
I am using BIRT 2.6.1 together with the default BIRT Viewer.
Thank You, rk

mwilliams

So, you only want to hide the column when printing, not when actually displaying the report?