Rave Reports Visual Designer

Section component (TRaveSection) - Standard Tab

A "Section" is a container area that holds a group of components. "Regions" are a container for Bands and DataBands. Remember that Bands must be placed in a "Region".

Section - Same Page

For example, say you had a logo and address information in a box at the top of a page and wanted to repeat this logo and box on the bottom on the page. The bottom part could be a tear off portion that was to be returned, like a meeting reservation. So for this case, you would first place a section on the top part of the page. Make sure that the section is large enough to hold the logo and address information. Now drop a bitmap component (for the logo) and some text components in that section. To make this realistic, change the properties of the text components to reflect a typical address that you would use. Now come the fun part, duplicating that for the bottom portion. It is only two steps, drop another section component at the desired location on the bottom of the page and set it's mirror property to point at the first section. That's it. Now you should have two sections that have identical contents. To prove it to yourself, go to the first section and make a change and note that the second section changes with the first. You could change the font size or color property. Or drag the bitmap component around a bit and watch the bitmap in section 2 follow the movements you are making in section 1.

Regions vs Sections

We need to emphasis that you should NOT mirror items that have a page state condition. The short explanation is that you can mirror components or a section definition from another page to your current page. However, we do NOT recommend or encourage that you mirror any sections, which contain region(s), band(s) or memo(s) as they each have page state condition(s). Why? Each region / band / memo must know its page state. For example, a region contains bands and these bands can be in a variety of conditions on each page break. The region maintains its status and knows where it is at with regard to wide variety of items including grouping, master-detail relations, totaling as the report progresses through the table.

You can mirror a section (from another Page or Global Page) but you must not mirror a section on that same page. We are aware that some users have been successful in mirroring regions and bands. However, we do NOT recommend that practice as you are gambling that you will not have a page state conflict or problem. If you do this and have a problem, we will request that you remove the mirror of a section, which contains a region and bands.

That's the secret - mirror sections that contain components, but do NOT mirror sections with regions, bands or memos.

Properties of Section

Anchor, DevLocked, DisplayOn, Height, Left, Locked, Mirror, Name, Tag, Top, Visible, WasteFit, Width

Regions