Printing Crystal Report detail section to second page collated

Question

I have a Crystal XI Release 2 report that my client wants to see on two pages. He wants the report to print the demographic information such as (name, address, etc...) for a person on the first page and the totals for the person need to print on the second page. The first page will include as many rows as will fit and the second page will have the same amount of rows which correspond one for one to the first page. Then the third page will contain a new page of people starting where the first ended.

He basically is looking for printing similar to how Excel prints (and please don't tell me to Export to Excel and print from there).

I came up with two ideas for doing this, but only got anywhere with one. The first was to run two reports (one for the demographic info and the other for the totals) which would be collated together somehow. I didn't get very far with this, but I didn't spend a ton of time researching this so I still think this could be an option.

The second way was to extend the report design to the width of two landscape pages, add my fields, and then change my page size back to a single landscape size before I get ready to print. This way sorta works, but can cause some weird issues. One is that if you try to edit/add a field on the second page when the report size is set to a single page landscape the fields are moved to the far right of the first page which makes sense because I would think that is supposed to be the editable region of the designer so I'd assume you're not supposed to have fields outside of this region.

All in all, the second way works, but I know there has to be a better way to do this. I wanted to see if anyone has had a similar request or have some other ideas on a better way to do this. Thanks

Answer 1

I can't think of an easy way to do this in Crystal.

You could get all hacky on the datasource and duplicate every 20(or however many fit on one page) rows. Then you would set up 2 details sections, one section for demographics and the other for totals. Then conditionally suppress them depending on remainder(pagenumber, 2).

Or you could use a subreport that accepts paging parameters and only returns 20 rows per page. But I'm not even sure if you can link a subreport parameter to the pagenumber special field.

How does your second way work? The extra fields just get printed on the next page somehow? However, the problem is that the fields stay outside the designer when you go back to one page and if you need to edit they all move back inside the designer? Couldn't you increase the page width before editing? That's not too bad if it somehow prints it out correctly every time.

Answer 2

I guess I will mark this as the answer since I still haven't been able to figure out a better way around it. If anyone finds a better way then post a response and if it works I think can toggle the answer.

What I do to get around this is to set my printer to the "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" and then change the width to the widest it will allow which is 36". Then I put the demographic information from the beginning of the section to around 11" and put the totals stating just to the right of where the first section ended and go for another page width.

Then I make whatever changes that I need to make and set the printer back to the printer I want to use for the correct size. After you do this you will find that the editable area only extends to the first page, but you can see the second page of fields to the right. If you try to edit a field on the second page the field will move to the far right of the editable region which is at the far right of the first page so make sure you reset your printer before making edits.

I think I also had to play around with the width of the detail section on the layout tab of the section expert to get the report to print correctly. I set it to the combined size of the 2 pages for mine to look correct.

I think that this is probably a super rare issue, but if you are having a similar issue, that is how I get around it.