How to hide group footer on subsequent pages?

[Aaron Abdis]

I have a group which needs the group footer to only show on the first page of a new grouping, but if the group goes to more than one page, the subequent pages should NOT show this footer. And then when the next grouping appears, it should again show this footer just on the first page for that group.

How would one go about doing this?

[Steve]

Hello Aaron,

Unless we have misunderstood your request, this is exactly how Telerik Report groups work. Whether the group sections (group header/group footer) are shown on each of the pages it occupies is controlled through the PrintOnEveryPage Property.

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Aaron Abdis]

Well, I had it set to print only on first page, but was trying to figure out how to hard-reset the page number on a change of group, so that it would think the first page of each new group was actually THE first page again.

I actually got what i needed by taking a different approach. I created a separate instance for each group, and put all the Reports into a ReportBook, with the report's option set to reset page-counting on each instance in the book.

I gotta tell ya, that ReportBook class is WAY freaking COOL! I'm coming from a world of reporting with Crystal 8.5, and you guys - as usual - have made a product LIGHTYEARS ahead of the competition!!!  :) 

Keep up the great work!!!

[Jonathan]

Steve,

Group Footers don't show up on the first page by default. The PrintOnEveryPage property will show the footer on every page of the report. But what if you only want it to show up on the first page of each new group only?

Background

I am trying to print a report with several records  which show correspodence between organisations. For each detail record group, there is a HTML TextBox that contains data that runs into another page. I'm using the GroupFooter to display to whom the correspondence (which is in the HTML TextBox of the detail section) is directed. Grouping  for the detail records is set to the CarbonCopy field (which is in the group footer).

The customer requires that this CarbonCopy indication is shown only on the first page. This means that for each new group, the GroupFooter must only appear on the first page of each new grouping.

Problem

In your documentation, it says that the GroupFooter by default appears on the first page of each new group. This is not entirely accurate.

If the group contains a single field object that spans multiple pages (like the HTML TextBox), the report engine sees all of the pages that the field spans as the first page. This means that the GroupFooter only appears on the last page on which the HTML TextBox has expanded to.

The only way to get the GroupFooter to actually show up on the first page of the group is to set its PrintOnEveryPage property to True. But that presents another problem: It breaks the customer's requirement that the GroupFooter contents appear only on the first page. Now it appears on every page that the group occupies.

Failed Alternatives

I obviously cannot use the ReportFooter, as it will show only the first CarbonCopy details for the first Group on every page of the report.

I cannot use the ReportBook either, because even if I create a new report instance for each CarbonCopy and add all of those individual reports to the ReportBook, the report will still have the problems outlined earlier, re: printing on every page vs. printing on the last page.

This is not a page numbering issue as outlined in Aaron's post. Therefore a ReportBook cannot help me.

This could technically work with a ReportBook if I used the ReportFooter instead of the GroupFooter for each report Instance and set its PrintOnLastPage property to false - but it would only work if the HTML TextBox has only spanned two pages. Sometimes correspondences span 3 to 5 pages and even more. This means that in the case of a 5 page correspondence, the ReportFooter would appear on pages 1 - 4, but not page 5. Again, this breaks the customer requirement. So I definitely can't use a ReportBook to solve this one.

Help?

I have scoured your documentation for the last 72 hours and have found no practical solution to what I'm trying to achieve. Do you have any ideas? Do I have to write code to accomplish what I need? Could that work? If so, what code should I use? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm using Telerik Reporting v. Q1 2012.

Thanks in advance,
Regards,
Jonathan.

[Steve]

Hi Jonathan,

You can't do what you need to with the group footer as it can either be shown on each page or only at the last. The report footer on the other hand is printed just once at the end of the report i.e. if you have several pages it would be shown only on the last.
The only section that matches your requirement is the group header that is printed at the beginning of each new group of records. The "quote" you thought was for the group footer must have been for the group header, for more info refer to Understanding Report Sections.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team