Improvements to Combination Print

Idea Place
1

I suggest improvements to Combination Print:

  • Functions or variables to determine the (global) page number of the first page of the current project and the current (relative) project page number. Use cases: Often you want to design the first page of a project differently from the following pages. When dealing with pre-printed forms all pages are structured differently.
  • base the project setting “minimum page count” on the project it is set for instead of on the whole combination print job. Use case: An official preprinted form needs to have x pages independendly from it’s position in AutoProjectFile.
  • Allow to skip a project in the NextCombinationPrintStep event. Use case: When retrieving data on demand or in the background while the first projects are printing you might have an empty result set and don’t want to print an empty page.
  • Allow to switch between AsVariables and AsFields without resetting the combination prints page numbers. Use cases: AsVariables comes in handy when dealing with single record data, text based layouts, forms and whenever you need to freely position data bound objects on a page. Currently you can’t use AsVariables in combination print without loosing contiguous page numbering and report-spanning TOC/IDX.
  • Fire NextCombinationPrintStep also for TOC/IDX projects
2

Additional use case: I’m adding values for a lot of variables in NextCombinationPrintStep only if they are actually used in the project e.g. because they are expensive to calculate and/or change depending on the current project.

If I can’t determine a value for a variable I want to skip the affected project and give the user a summary saying exactly why which project was skipped after the print job is finished.

Without skipping affected projects LL either stops printing with a generic error message or (probably even worse) prints dummy data, wrong values or breaks part of the report depending on if and how the variable was registered.