Data bands and whitespace from hidden text

[E_vanhoof]

Hello Stimulsoft. I've been using the report generating tools as part of JobBOSS2's ERP system and I'm having trouble coaxing their locked down reports into something cleaner.

Their quote report by default is using a data band that makes rows for each part number and each quantity, adding a line break in between each part number grouping. For our customer's convenience I wanted to add a description of what machining we will be providing with the quoted part number by importing data from a description field into the quote report. This description can sometimes be formatted with up to 5 lines of text denoting our machining operations.

Due to the fact that the default report that JB2 generates splits up quantity breaks into different lines, this means that the full height of the description is added to each line, making part numbers with multiple quantities take up a lot more white space than they should.

I have tried using each option of "Processing Duplicates" (hide / remove text / merge), and each seems to still keep the whitespace that would be taken up by the text box. The data band does have the flag for "Can Shrink" checked, so that is not the issue.

I have tried using a Sub-Report to group up the quantities and pricing into the row, and it works with some issues. For one, it's still going to repeat the quantity/price breakdown for each quantity due to how JB2 handles quotes internally. Two, I think I need to add some part number filtering for the Sub-Report, as it outputs the quantity and price for all items on the quote in the first data row. Third, somehow I think the sub-report is causing other data rows to not output, as a quote with 4 line items combines all the pricing into the first line item and ignores the rest.

So my question: Is there some simple command I missed that would make duplicate entries not even evaluate expressions within them before hiding the text? My IIF expression that grabs the part description could just not repeat on repeat entries, I'd be fine with ~1 line of wasted space instead of 5.

Second question: Would there be a way to only output the first data row per Part Number and ignore the exact same part number at different quantities if I wanted to continue with the Sub-Report method, or would I need to use fancy trickery with a custom SQL query to pull only the first entry for each?

Thank you for any help.

[Lech Kulikowski]

Hello,

Please send us a sample report with test data that reproduces the issue for analysis.

Thank you.