Print on back side of 1st page only

I have a SRS report that we are using as an invoice. I want to print out terms on the backside of the 1st page. Is this possible? Any ideas on how to go about doing this? I think the best way to go about doing this is to print the whole report double sided, and leave every 'even numbered' page blank expcept page 2, where the terms would print. I'm just not sure how to go about doing this in SRS.

Any help would be appreciated.

Randy

To start out with, can you be sure that content for each of the subsequent pages (page 3 and up, I mean) will be less than a page in length, with explicit page breaks between each, or does the content have to "flow" through pages 3, 4, etc without explicit page breaks? Does the content for page 1, similarly, have a known length, or can you force it to have a known length?

This is a cool problem <s>.

>L<

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The report is an invoice report. Page 1 will contain some header information (logo, address, customer, etc) and then will begin to list invoice lines. More than likely these invoice lines will carry over into multiple pages depending on how many items the customer ordered. In this case, page 1 would need to print with all of my header information and as much invoice line information as will fit, then page 2 would need to print terms, then page 3 should continue where page 1 left off. Page 4 would then need to be printed blank (since we are printing double sided) and page 5 would continue where page 3 left off, etc, etc. The challenge is telling SQL, "OK, now that we are on page 2, print this instead" and then, "now that we are on page 3, continue printing."

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Randy

Example:

Page 1 - Header, and body section

Page 2 - Terms

Page 3 - Body section from page 1 continued (if needed)

Page 4 - Blank

Page 5 - Body section from page 3 continued (if needed)

Page 6 - Blank

Page 7 - Body section from page 5 continued (if needed)

Page 8 - Blank

etc, etc

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>> No explicit page breaks

That's what I was afraid of -- makes things a little more complex, but I think it can be done... sorry for the delay in response...

OK, this is really cool. And I tried it a bunch of other ways, some of which might work and be less wierd -- but this really does work perfectly and doesn't disturb the "preview" layout at all -- it will only affect the print and PDF layout (and presumably other renderers that go to fixed page dimensions).

Here's how it works: It depends on something that usually annoys the heck out of us: the behavior of "wide" report designs in terms of page breaks for fixed page layouts such as print and PDF.

This is what you do:

1) First, figure out how you are going to separate the content of the first page from other pages and design your report with *two* tables, one for first page and one for the other pages. The first table obviously has your header while the second does not.

I did this by creating a SELECT statement that included a row number using SQL Server capabilities, because you can't filter or break by the the reporting RowNumber() function. You can do this in other environments as well -- in another thread somewhere here I show a worked example for doing it in SQL 2000 -- and you could also just use two datasets, one for each table. But in SQL 2005 it's really easy to do this:

Code Snippet

SELECT Row_Number() OVER (ORDER BY Whatever) As MyRowNum,*
FROM YourData ORDER BY Whatever

2) Now you make sure you only have the right details for each table. In my example, it worked out to have these two filters. If you split your data by some other method into one dataset for each of the tables , you don't need to do this:

Code Snippet

=Fields!MyRowNum.Value <= =15 ' first table

=Fields!MyRowNum.Value > =15 ' second table

3) Design your two tables so that they fit within the normal printable page limits -- if your paper size is, for example, 8.5 * 11, you should make sure that the tables are no wider than will print properly in this normally.

4) Here's the trick: You need to make the layout (page size -- *not* interactive page size) wider than will print properly for your page set up.

Horizontally across from table #1 , you put a rectangle (or whatever) holding your Terms details for the invoice.

Horizontally across from table #2, you don't need to put anything.

The layout ends up looking something like this:

Real layout (say, 7.5") a bit of space for comfort addtl layout, forcing the break

Header information, part of Table number one, plus the details that fit on page 1

Your terms go here Table number two with the rest of your details

The extra layout you put in should not be any more than 8" wide (in the example where the page is 8.5" wide) and preferably it should be a bit less.

The result is exactly what you want and what we usually do not want but get by accident, when we design page layouts that don't fit in a fixed page size:

the terms are pushed to page 2 and each appearance of table #2, starting with page 3, gets followed by an extra blank page...

Whaddya think?

>L<