[AccessD] Report Printing Problem - Graphs Being Split

Hi Mike,

<<When a report is printed, any textual or graphical sub-report which starts
before the end of the page is "split" i.e.. part of it prints on the page it
started on and the rest prints on the following page. This is particularly
horrific when a graph is being printed - the "pie" ends up not only sliced
but also severed! I think I can live with textual type reports being split
across pages, but splitting a graph into 2 parts isn't acceptable.>>

  I'm going to suggest something and it may solve it with a little
experimentation, but if it doesn't it will certainly get you started in the
right direction.

  First, what your seeing is more or less normal report engine behavior, so
there is no easy fix for this (i.e. no setting to change) and your going to
need to mange this problem on your own.  The Access report engine is quite
controllable, much more so then many people think.  You've already seen some
of that with hiding/un-hiding sub reports with no data.

  I'm going to toss out three things that you can use to control reports and
when combined, you'll be really surprised at some of the things you can do.

1. "Two Pass" printing - This is where by placing a reference to .Pages
anywhere on the report, you force Access to do a dry run of the report to
figure out the total number of pages.  It then does a second pass to
actually print the report.

   What's interesting with this is that on the first pass, you can build a
table of contents, find what page sections will fall, the number of
sections, which will print or not, etc and store that in a temp table.  Then
on the print pass, use the built temp table to drive printer logic.

   One big gotcha here: You should have no code in the OnPrint event that
would affect the print layout.  The reason is that on the first pass, Access
does not fire the OnPrint event at all for any section.  So all your
conditional code needs to be in a OnFormat event.

2. Use of:

   MoveLayout property  - specifies whether Microsoft Access should move to
the next printing location on the page.
   NextRecord property - specifies whether a section should advance to the
next record.
   PrintSection property  - specifies whether a section should be printed.

3. Use of:

   Top property - Tells you how far down the page you are
   Left property - Tells you what column your in


  So where does this all get us?   What I see is this:  Do a two pass
report, and record the size of each subreport in inches of page that it
occupies.  Store that info in a temp table.

  On the second pass, use the temp table info and the Top property to
determine if you have sufficient space left on the page to print the graph.
If not, use MoveLayout = True, NextRecord = False to skip down the page
until a new page is forced or hide/un-hide a page break control.

  I believe that will work. As I said though, it may require some
experimentation to get it to work right. If your willing to give it a go,
I'll go into more detail.  In the meantime, I'll give it some more thought
and see if there might be an easier way.

Let me know,
Jim.
-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Mike
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 5:45 AM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: [AccessD] Report Printing Problem - Graphs Being Split


Hi Folks.

I've been a "lurker" here for some time now - and have benefited enormously
from the knowledge shared in AccessD. Please accept my thanks for the effort
each and everyone of you puts into this list.

I'm still trying to find a question I can help with - although by the time I
get to see the questions they have generally been answered!
<<snip>>