Hi Drew, > Referring to the page > http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/SUN_Report_Builder/Planned_Features#Flowing_Text_in_Sections > the questions comes up on a fairly regular basis on the forums and > seeing that a good number of the other features are starting to show up > just wondered about this particular one.
No particular plan. (In general, stay tuned for some more updates on future implementations, I hope to be able to send out some updates soon.) The problem here is that for this to happen, Writer would have to learn much more features. For instance, imagine a field in a page footer, which sums over the "income" fields on the given page. To implement this with flow reports, Writer would need to learn such "sum-over-(parts-of-)page" fields. And much more, since of course you cannot only sum, but have arbitrary formulas. Currently, this calculation can be done in the reporting engine, since the layout (and thus the distribution of items over pages) is fixed at report generation time. With flow reports, the layout is done at the time the doc is loaded, thus such layout-dependent calculations would need to happen there, too - and this is where Writer misses some features. Personally, I think a "Can Grow" property at text fields - in the meaning of "in each instance of this field in the final report, grow the respective instance vertically if necessary" - would be a tremendous step forward, and also would be much easier (though perhaps still challenging, not sure) to implement. Ciao Frank -- - Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer [email protected] - - Sun Microsystems http://www.sun.com/staroffice - - OpenOffice.org Base http://dba.openoffice.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
