Skip to main content

Nrapid, working with page breaks and report options


So far we been working with reports and exploring a couple of options on how to group data, customize dialogs and so on, but we never talk about printing.

While there isn’t much to say about printing when it comes to standard reports, I mean, you execute the report, press print and you are pretty much set.  When it comes to complex reports, we have a couple of options.

In this post I’m going to talk about page breaks and how they behave in reports that contain grouped data.
Continuing with the categories and products example, we want to print each category in her own page (a group per page) this means that we need a page break after each group of data.

By default, NRapid will not going to add page breaks after groups, because internally doesn’t knows what a group is. It just going to emit standard html based on the default style sheet or the specified raw style. The easiest way to insert page breaks, is by building the report using the “table per group” approach, and tells to NRapid please insert a page break after each table in this report. This can be done with a couple of lines of code that may look like this.


When you execute the report, you are not going to see anything special; the only thing that changes is a header that is used by printers.



If you print the report, you should get something like this:




Something that worth to mention, in all the examples we have seen there is a common anti pattern called select n + 1. This can be  fixed easily using datasets instead of data tables, hit the database ones and then work with the data set in memory.


You can get the source code of NRapid from here
And the sample app from here
The Northwind database is available from download at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23654

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to create MS Word documents from Office templates using C#

The OpenXML SDK allows you to do pretty much anything you want with office files such as Excel, Word, etc… While many people like this library, I found it complex, unintuitive and poorly documented, not to mention the awful xml format that uses under the hood to represent the documents, styles, etc. So I decided not to use it and build my own solution. If you, like me, don’t like that library, you will find in this post an alternative approach to build word documents from templates using c#. A neat trick to work with Office is to use the macro recorder to understand how things work. The macro recorder allows you to start a macro, do something by hand, stop it, and then take a look at the generated VBA code. Once you do this, you are pretty much set. This is how it looks the template I’am going to use. Note: save the file as a Word template (.dotx) This is the code to create Word documents from C#: By running the code, you should get a document that looks...

Printing html using the embedded web browser control

In this post I’ll try to answer some questions about the web browser control and provide some workarounds for known issues involved in the printing process. I'm assuming that you have some experience with the web browser control and basic knowledge of COM and hosting APIs. So I’m not going to cover those topics. At the bottom of this page I’ve added the links to download a small library I wrote that takes care of printing HTML and a demo app so you can try it out without having to write any code by yourself. Using the code The HtmlPrinter class will allow you to print html from an URL or just passing the html as string, you can also specify the title and the number of copies you want to print. The code may look something like this: Now that we know how to use the API let get answer some questions. Why my app crashes when I try to print multiple copies of a page? Well, apparently when you send a lot of print commands to the web browser control, ther...

How to replace text with images on Word documents using C#

This post it’s a reply to a question I got from a previous post that shows how to work with Word templates from C# code . If you haven’t read it, I recommend to do so because I’m not going into details here. But basically it was about how to create a Word document from a template and perform same text manipulation. So, the question from Marcel Kieboom  was “Do you know if it would be also possible to replace one of the words with an image which is locally stored?” The answer is yes, and this is how you can do that. Based on the same convention I had used in the previous post, I should have a template like this: What I’m trying to do here is replace the text [angus-young] for an actual pic of Angus. The technique I’m using it’s pretty common on web sites and basically consist in have an image with a matching name for each keyword I want to replace and then create the image path dynamically. This is the C# code to do that. * When I execute t...