vertical lines and boxes on RTC reports

davmac1

What is the best way to emulate a preprinted invoice form?
I can make the field borders solid, but that still leaves an empty space between the last detail line and the invoice footer.
Do I have to write code to draw the lines or is there a way of providing an overlay that fits around the fields?

I have seen some great invoice forms designed with Crystal - do we have the same capability with RDLC and Navision?

Belias

mmh, i guess that we have the same problem that we have when we want to print a piece of report always in the bottom of the body...
i think you have to print some blank lines to fill the gap between the body and the footer...
An idea (but i don't think it will work smoothly) is to make a list as high as the page height (minus header/footer/borders....) and then draw lines within it. But for my experience, lines have always a fancy behaviour and they may go up&down for some reason :shock: . Moreover you will have to match the lines in the body with those in the footer, which is not "cool programming"

alwaysguna

Hi,

Were you able to find any solution for this issue in RTC ? I have quite a few reports which requires this modification in RDLC layout.

davmac1

No - the customer decided they could live without vertical lines.
Otherwise I would have tried to put enough printable blank lines in the body to reach the footer.
There is some logic in the sales invoice that does not print blank lines, but it is easy to modify. It is in the report layout that determines whether a line is visible.

alwaysguna

Hi

Thanks for the reply.

I did analyse the Sales Invoice report layout and started to wonder how we would know the exact number of lines which are to be shown/hidden? There is also possiblity of printing multiple pages in which case we do not have the liberty we had in Classic using the integer,presections etc..

Would you mind throwing some more light on this topic ?

clausl

I spend quite some time trying to get vertical lines to work in RDLC 2005, the RDLC format we have in NAV 2009.
I ended up creating background images which then solved the task.
Creating the vertical lines the way I wanted in RDLC 2008 was easy and just worked. RDLC 2008 is the format we will have in NAV '7'.
So while we wait for NAV '7' and RDLC 2008 I suggest you look into if you can just create a background image and this way control the vertical lines.

/Claus

davmac1

Thanks Claus.
Can you post an example on your blog?

Background images - is this something we can create in the layout designer?

clausl

I just used my favorite image editor, Paint.Net, then create a image of the size of a A4 page minus the margins, header and footer in the report.
Then I placed the lines where I wanted them, and saved picture on disk.
Then opened the report where I wanted the vertical lines in VS, and embedded the image into the report.
And at last pointed to this image in the "BackgroundImage" property of the body.
Not the most elegant way to do this, but it worked

/Claus

davmac1

OK
Many thanks