In my section I have several tables (both dynamic and nested dynamic) filling up the area between the master page’s header and footer margin and flowing over to the second page when necessary. This part works as intended.
Now I need to have an area on the first page and just above its master page’s footer margin where I can put data in. If I do this on the print section with an absolute positioned box it gets overwritten by the tables. Not good. So the obvious solution would be to make the master page’s footer bigger and put it in the thus created space.
The issue however is that the height of the area is quite variable. Sometimes I would only need room for 1 line of text, sometimes I would need like 60 mm. I don’t want to enlarge the master page’s footer always with 60mm just because I might need that much. In the cases I don’t need that much I would loose far too much room for the section’s regular tables.
Apparently programmatically changing the master page’s footer is still not possible.
So I’m looking for some ingenious alternative solution. Who has some clever ideas?
Bit hard to envision without seeing the design but you could try the following.
Add a footer row to the table and create a script to personalize it’s content. Subsequently set the visibility of this row. To set the visibility: right mouse click the row and choose Row > Show from the contextual menu. These options shown allow you to define when this footer row is shown. We cannot explicity set the page number but you have options to show this row before page breaks (in that case it is omitted on the last page the table runs on), show it after page breaks (it will not be shown on the starting page of the table) or show it on all pages the table runs on.
See the screendumps below. The first image shows the row setup. The second and third image show this row for different records in Preview mode. In my case I added text of different lengths.
Do you have a fixed number of text variants? If so you could create a section for each variant and use a Conditional Print Section script (or Control Script) to toggle the visibility of these sections.
No, unfortunately not. It’s really very variable. As far as I can tell, setting the master page’s footer margin would be the only viable solution. Is that something that’s being looked into as far as you know?
Creating the prefab sections or using the table footer is the best I can come up with at this stage.
Setting the header and footer margins from within a Control Script would be the solution for your use case? This assumes you can define their position based on your data. Let me know and I’ll create an Improvement Request.
Setting the margins from a Control Script would certainly be a solution, though setting them from a regular script would even be better, but I guess that would be asking for too much.
An even better alternative would be to be able to define a positioned box on a section where other (non-positioned) boxes would “flow around” like in DTP programs.
In my case this “Flow around” box would be positioned right above the footer and have 100% width, but I guess the image is clearer in what I’m after.
Thanks for your feedback. We could take this step by step. The lowhanging fruit is setting this as part of a Control Script. These run before the personalisation and paginating process. It would simply overwrite existing settings.
Subsequently we can take a look how to integrate this into the pagination process and set this as part of the personalisation scripts.
Flow around absolute position objects is on our list but also a bit more complex to implement.
We have a feature freeze for the oncoming 2018.1 release. The first oppertunity will be version 2018.2, which is scheduled for the end of this year. I have good hopes that we can implement the Control Script approach and perhaps the User Script approach. Realistically, I don’t expect flow around absolute positioned objects to be part of that version.
