group band printing horizontally

rbuser

I have a report with 3 group bands. The first one is by customer
Name, second by inventory category, and the third is by items withing
each inventory category. I would like to have the third group band
print horizontally instead of vertically to save space. Is this
possible?

digitalmetaphors

A group band can't print in a different orientation natively.

Are you using columns in the report?

If you are using a one column report then I think you can achieve this
programatically by using our draw command architecture. ReportBuilder's
native output is page objects. On these page objects are draw command
objects. There is one draw command for each component (text, line, shape...)
to be printed on the page. It is possible to add/remove/modify the draw
commands after a page has been generated and right before it is sent to the
output device.

I think by using the rotated label component, you can add a draw command to
the page which can draw rotated text. What you could do is use the
OnDrawCommandCreate event to grab a handle to the draw commands that are
going to be created on the page. Then in the Report.OnEndPage event you can
loop through these objects(use a TList) and create rotated text draw
commands to represent the text on the third group band. The only
consideration is when and where to perform this operation. Then you'll need
to shift all the detail bands upwards on the page to account for the group
that draws horizontally. By modifying the draw commands, it shouldn't be
that bad, except that there may be room left over to print another record on
this page because the bands have moved up to occupy the space the group 3
header band used to print in. With this approach, the report engine has been
told that there is not enough space left to print on the page so you can't
generate another detail band on the page. I don't think there are any more
considerations, I'll have to construct a demo for something similar to this,
using lookup data to create draw commands that are rotated.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors