PDF printing with formm command

[Bruce Easton]

I've been having some great results giving one client, that has limited 
filepro processing capability, the ability to build their own sets of 
forms that output from their web-based application as PDF, sequenced and 
categorized as the client dictates.  (Using the new 5.8 feature to 
create PDFs directly from filepro.)

I ran into an issue, though, using the formm command where I'm not sure 
if it should be considered a bug.  I have, for years, used the formm 
command to piece together pieces of forms where one format might be only 
a line or two high, for various purposes where one might be the output 
from a series of child file records.  This has for me been historically 
useful (over just using rreport) in cases where you may want to mix and 
match header/detail forms and where the operator can choose between the 
pieces of output that they would like ultimately as one document.

Normally, filepro doesn't paginate with each formm command, and that has 
made it useful for, as mentioned above, outputting detail lines within a 
lookup loop (from rclerk).  What I'm finding with the new PDF printing 
within filepro is that the formm command does seem to always paginate at 
the start of the format.  I've tried this with and without different 
<page...> markup height settings - which are obeyed, but I still just 
get a new page when using formm, even if the resulting PDF page is only 
a few lines tall.

To work around this, I'm  calling rreport to do the job, but rather than 
running out of the detail file, I am calling rreport with a specific 
record (-sr) and then inside the output processing, I am using a loop to 
output the detail using the "print" command -this works nicely and 
quickly, and I didn't have to modify very much of my original code that 
was meant for rclerk.

The formm command does allow output from multiple output formats to be 
combined into one PDF (terminating with "form" command), but it seems 
that having formm always paginate in this scenario is not historically 
consistent.



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