PDA

View Full Version : Re: Print_Columns property in Winprint2 - positions of???



Nathanael Saint-Pierre
18-Jan-2005, 11:29 PM
John,

my 2% is to make the wizard better by giving the developper the ability to
change the position of some field after the preview. Now they are readonly
and cannot be changed. I guess this is possible as per VDFQuery.

--
Nathanael Saint-Pierre
Programmeur / Analyste
Directeur Général
Software Communications Plus Inc.
8780 Lajeunesse Montréal QC H2M 1R6
Canada
Tel: (514) 382-2577 ou 1 (866) 417-7587
Fax: (514) 382-5977
www.softwarecomplus.com
www.multicontacts.com
info@softwarecomplus.com

"John van Houten" <john-h@dataaccess.com> wrote in message
news:C2F8E58C1F7D4A4CB525AC96D503B58E0C640B@bunyip .abacus-labs.com...
> Bob,
>
> I agree.
>
> Have you tried the new WinPrint wizards? They have a preview option that
> lets you preview the layout without compiling.
>
> regards John van Houten
>
>
> "Bob Cergol" <rcergol@compuserve.com> wrote in message
> news:F5430B3E4E15E947BF4B804AF2C8DD0B1F3131@emaile r.dataaccess.com...
> John,
>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> The single most time-consuming task of reporting is formatting. It is
> tedious to say the least. Not having to deal with this in
> code/compile/test
> cycles is probably the single biggest contributor to Crystal Report's
> success.
>
> Would it not be worthwhile to provide any shortcuts possible to ease this
> aspect?
>
> The VDF Studio already lets you create views visually and it generates the
> code that defines the location of all the objects. Could this not also be
> done for Winprint and made part of the report wizard? I'm not suggesting
> reproducing the level of "wysiwyg" that Crystal implements -- but
> something
> better than trial-and-error of dfWritePos and DfHeaderMargin
> hm_BottomInner
> code/compile/test cycles.
>
> The column feature might have been one small step in that direction.
>
> Bob
>
> "John van Houten" <john-h@dataaccess.com> wrote in message
> news:F5430B3E4E15E947BF4B804AF2C8DD0B1F312D@emaile r.dataaccess.com...
>> Hi Bob,
>>
>> This was a pretty wierd and difficult feature to use in WinPrint 1. It
>> did
>> not work the way that you might think it should. Actually it also seemed
> to
>> have quite a few problems.
>>
>> WinPrint 2 'might' support the column feature. The truth is that the
> feature
>> has been written into WinPrint 2, but in the end, when we looked at it we
>> decided that the feature was so wierd and difficult to make work properly
>> that we would not encourage its use. So it is not an officially supported
>> feature of WinPrint 2. It has not been properly tested and my guess is
> that
>> it probably will not work properly. That might be OK because it is pretty
>> difficult to figure out what proper functionality is with this feature.
>>
>> My advise is to not use the 'column' feature in WinPrint 2 or WinPrint 1.
>>
>> regards John van Houten
>>
>> "Bob Cergol" <rcergol@compuserve.com> wrote in message
>> news:F5430B3E4E15E947BF4B804AF2C8DD0B1F2FE1@emaile r.dataaccess.com...
>> Okay, I found this in the docs:
>>
>> "Note: The columns is provided for backward compatibility with Winprint1.
> It
>> is not used in Winprint2 and should be omitted."
>> Odd, because it's defined in Winprint2.pkg and it also was not documented
> as
>> to how to use it in Winprint1.
>>
>>
>> "Bob Cergol" <rcergol@compuserve.com> wrote in message
>> news:F5430B3E4E15E947BF4B804AF2C8DD0B1F2FD5@emaile r.dataaccess.com...
>> > I have some old winprint reports I need to rewrite -- either using
>> Starzen's
>> > classes -- or it might be quicker for me to just update them as
> winprint2
>> > reports. But if I do that I want to save some tedium in positioning by
>> > definging column positions. Starzen's classes allow you to define
> columns.
>> > Winprint seems like it does, but doesn't document how.
>> >
>> > There is a property in Winprint2 called Print_Columns, and two
>> > commands:
>> > dfWriteCol and dfWritLnCol
>> > From the docs: "DFWriteCol appends data to the current line at the
>> specified
>> > column" and "The number of columns on the page is specified by
>> > Procedure
>> > DFNew_page (0 is legal). Columns are numbered ordinally from left to
> right
>> > starting with 1. They are a convenience not only for coding, but for
>> freeing
>> > much code of sensitivity to the current metrics setting. "
>> >
>> > No where in the Docs, on Wasp or in DAW's knowledgebase can I find any
>> > information on just how one would go about defining the horizontal
>> > positioning of columns.
>> >
>> > Can anyone tell me? A quick perusal of Winprint2.pkg makes it seem like
>> this
>> > capability is not actually implemented.
>> >
>> > Bob
>> >
>> >
>>
>