Controlling Line Breaks in Variable Length Expression

[NutsAndBolts]

(Report Designer v7.0.72.0)

My company sells products with radically varying amounts of invoicing information - sometimes just a name, sometimes a name, part number, HS tariff code, country of origin, batch code, supplier conformity certification code, trace code etc.

To cut down on white space, I've used an expression to concatenate whichever fields are populated and put it in an auto-growing box in my report. This works reasonably well, but the strings themselves also vary in length considerably, so if I give them each a newline it often wastes a lot of space. I prefer to seperate them with "|"s on one line and allow it to wrap, but this then can introduce line breaks in the middle of a field ( "Turnip | Carrot | Sweet
Potato" ).

I'd like automatic line breaks, but only inbetween fields, not within them. Of course, Unicode gave us the non breaking space for this reason, and reports will accept them and interpret them correctly, but maddeningly, they'll be replaced with placeholder "?"s when you actually export the document as a PDF for email.

I suppose I could track a running total of character length and insert line breaks when the total would otherwise break into a new line, but that potential rats' nest of nested IF() functions seems pretty unwieldy.

Is there any other way to supress line breaks within certain sections of an expression?

[brucedenney]

Hi

The strategy you are using is the problem as you have no control over the line breaks.

The way I would do this is to have footer sections for each line and a conditional format that supresses the printing of the line if there is no value.

So if there are potentially 5 lines I woudl have 5 footers, each woudl be suppresed if the contents was blank.

Yuo can see this strategy/technique in invoice layouts wher ethe comments are each in thier own section and supressed when empty.

[NutsAndBolts]

Is this solution able to join the strings into one line? Having them all on seperate lines is what I am trying to avoid.

[brucedenney]

If you have separate lines, you have control over where the line breaks are, if you put all the fields into one string, you have no control.

This avoids blank lines and allows you to control where the line breaks happen.

You could concatenate a few strings on each line, but if the line is wider than can be printed it will still wrap with no control.

...............

Perhaps you could build a huge string with delimeters in it between each group of words you are not wanting to split.

Assuming x chars fit on a line

You then chop the line up into separate strings less than x chars and with a delimeter at the end of each making sure all the words stay together on the line.

Each string then gets printed using its own footer section to supress it if it is empty.