OPO: Need Guru Help! - Variable size details

Any OPO gurus got any tricks up thier sleeves for this one?

I'm doing a report with a Master/Detail by using the technique from the "Kolste" Power Objects Handbook, whereas the main part of the report is done in a group header using an embedded form and the associated multi records are done in the report detail section. This part works OK. The hard part is that I have several small fixed sized detail record items followed by a variable length long text type field. This particular text item could contain anywhere from 0 to 32k characters, including CR's and LF's.

Normally you have to preset the size of both the detail section and the text field to a static length. Since you can't use a scroll box on a report, (one that scrolls) this becomes a real problem.

I might have just one or up to 300 details records in different cases. If I made the section and field as big as possible to fit on the page, then each detail record would take up that space even if the text was null. This is of course not a reasonable solution. I want each record nicely appended to the last without huge gaps or loss of text..

One approach I took was to add the rowid into the section as invisible, and trigger on the details PostChildChange method,, then look at the data in text column and guess how many lines it would take up. Then multiply height factors to manipulate first the deail section's SizeY then the text item's SizeY on the fly. The only thing wrong with this was that I couldn't evaluate until after the form wrote out the record first. Subsequently, I was always a record behind. You can't even take charge of moving the pointer in a report's recordset to move back and forth.

This is a real limitation for OPO. In a tool like Crystal Reports, you have the option of making dynamic text items wrap multiline. You just define the width and each record is adjusted accordingly to fit. Since I'm running client apps on 68K Macs, this is not an option.

I'm out of ideas. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Larry Frazier
Hughes Electronics
vp19211_at_msgate.emis.hac.com

--

Posted using Reference.COM                         http://www.reference.com
Browse, Search and Post         Usenet and Mailing list Archive and Catalog.

InReference, Inc. accepts no responsibility for the content of this posting.