Space between rows in "Details" section with Auto Grow

[iwbnwif]

Hello!

I am using Sage 50 Professional 2012 and have a report designer question. Previously I have used Crystal Reports and iReport which are somewhat similar.

I understand that the "Details" section is the heart of any report, for example an invoice where it contains the individual invoice lines. For my invoice layout I have a description (i.e. INVOICE_ITEM.TEXT) that can be quite long, so I have set "Auto Grow" and "Word Wrap" to true. This works fine, but the next line starts immediately below any 'grown' (i.e. multi-line) descriptions and the spacing in my design is not honoured.

I have tried adding a dummy box to create more space but this does not anchor properly.

Help!!

[brucedenney]

Not clear what is happening.

The next line should start below the preceding one. It would hardly be above or on top of it.

[iwbnwif]

Sorry for not being clear.

The next line should start below the preceding one. It would hardly be above or on top of it.

Yes, but I would like some space between the lines (say 5mm) rather than it being *immediately* below the preceding one.

I can make a space between the lines by adjusting the height of the "Details" section, but as soon as the description 'Auto Grows' beyond that height the next line is bunched up.

[brucedenney]

So the box expands to fill in the gap and you loose your line space.

The quick and easy solution (I would chose this) is to put the gap at the top of the section instead of at the bottom. So you have a gap before each line rather than after each line. Not exactly what you wanted but darn close. You would also need to do this in the non service section as well.

If you want to do this "correctly" (ie having the first item start directly under the heading without a gap before it) then adding the gap to the bottom will not work if the item is a non service item, putting the gap in the non service item section will not work because the comments will appear after the gap not before the gap. The comments are conditionally printed so you can't put the gap on them either as sometimes they will or will not print.

So the "proper" solution is to add another section beneath all the item sections (after comment2) which is just a spacer section. This prints after the Service items or the Non service items and comments (if any).

It is worth noting that there may/will be a time when the extra line will just take the invoice over 1 page and you will end up with the blank line taking the invoice over a page and it might look strange as a result.

Finally if you just want to do as you describe then the solution is to add a blank line to the end of the "TEXT" field so that is expands to have a blank line at the end. To do this replace the Field INVOICE_ITEM.TEXT with the expression INVOICE_ITEM.TEXT + "\n "

The \n means a new line. I don't think this is documented anywhere in Sage but it is a standard way of expressing a newline and it works. The Space after the newline is needed because empty blank lines are cleaned up. This would move the whole section to the next page if it was 1 line too long so is neater in some ways than the "proper solution".

[iwbnwif]

Thank you very much for such a comprehensive and insightful response.

Of course I should have put a gap at the top in the first place this works fine for my needs too.

For what its worth I also found that setting the "padding" value of the border property also creates a space.

Thank you once again for your help!

[brucedenney]

Hadn't thought of using the padding, good idea,but would that pad all around the field and lead to space at the top ?

[iwbnwif]

but would that pad all around the field and lead to space at the top ?

Yep, but it doesn't look too bad with a value of '5'.

Anyway, thanks to your posts on here I feel a lot more comfortable using the report designer than I did a couple of weeks ago!