To Be Continued

Have you ever wanted to print a "Continued Next Page" message at the bottom of a report? I see this most commonly for contribution statements, but it can be on any report that sometimes requires more than one page per person in the output.

This solution for ShelbyQUERY's Report Designer (which is a variety of Active Reports). It involves three control objects and a one-line VBScript. This solution assumes the following facts about your report:

• You are using GroupHeader1 as the "per page" grouping level. If you are using another Group level, substitute it for GroupHeader1 as needed.
• You have changed the NewPage property for GroupFooter1 to 2 - After.
• The PageFooter section remains as part of the design, and it is where the "Continued" message should print.

To begin, add the following three control objects to the PageFooter section, changing the properties to match those listed beneath each control:

1. a Bound Control
   1. (Name) = ctlCurrentPage
   2. SummaryGroup = GroupHeader1
   3. SummaryRunning = 1 - ddSRGroup
   4. SummaryType = 4 - ddSMPageCount
   5. Visible = False
2. a second Bound Control
   1. (Name) = ctlTotalPages
   2. SummaryGroup = GroupHeader1
   3. SummaryRunning = 0 - ddSRNone
   4. SummaryType = 4 - ddSMPageCount
   5. Visible = False
3. a Label
   1. (Name) = lblContinued
   2. Caption = Continued on Next Page

Put the "Continued" label wherever you want it to print. Because they will remain invisible on the print out, the two bound controls can be anywhere.

Open the Script Editor and change to the PageFooter object. Then change to the OnBeforePrint event. Because the PageCount value works like an aggregate value, this script must be placed in the OnBeforePrint section. Paste the following line of code in between the Sub and End Sub lines, as shown:

Sub OnBeforePrint

rpt.lblContinued.Visible = Not Eval("rpt.ctlCurrentPage.DataValue = rpt.ctlTotalPages.DataValue")

End Sub

The code checks to see if the current page number is equal to the last page number in the segment. If they are the same, the comparison will evaluate to True. If they are different (for any page before the last page), the comparison will evaluate to False. The "Not" reverses this value, so that the "visible" property of the label will be False for the last page of the segment and True for every other page.

In short, you will see that the "Continued" message appears whenever there is more than one page for a given GroupHeader1 segment, but it will never appear on the final page of the segment.