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Textbox Content Disappears or Gets Cut Off Inside Of a Page-Header

Environment

Product Progress® Telerik® Reporting 14.2.20.1021
Project Type Any report with page header section

Description

The page header in a report can not grow or shrink and therefore can not accommodate for content expanding outside it's section-area. For example, if a textbox has a longer string than it can fit, and the CanGrow property is set to True, the textbox will increase in size to make room for the entire string. Then, if the textbox expands below the edges of the section, either the string will be cut off, or disappear entirely.

Steps to Reproduce

  • Create a textbox and place it at the bottom of the page header
  • Set its value to something that will not fit inside the textbox and therefore cause the textbox to expand and the text to wrap into a new line
  • If the line-break occurs so that the new line appears below the bottom of the section, in Preview the textbox will either disappear or be cut off

Cause\Possible Causes

  • When the section's KeepTogether Is True:

    When an element is expanding below the bottom of a page-header, first, the element will be attempted to be moved to the next page-header. If the element can fit within the calculated size of the next page-header, it will be moved there, regardless if there is any next page. Because every page-header is based on the same section design, the element will actually never show up in any page-header. If the element can not fit within the calculated size of the next page-header, it will remain on the original page, but with it's content cut off.

  • When The Section's KeepTogether Is False:

    The text will be cut off if spilling beyond the page-header area

Suggested Workarounds

Set PageHeader Height with Bindings

The Height of the Page Header section may be changed at runtime through Bindings. It is recommended that you set the default height of the section to the maximal expected one. Then, you may reduce the height of each Page section with a proper Binding. The reason behind this approach is to assure that the available height of the page after rendering the Page Header and Footer will be positive, so that some detailed content can be placed on the page. If the combined height of the Page Header and Page Footer is bigger than the page height, the Page sections will be ignored and only the content will be rendered. The behavior of the KeepTogether property may also change due to the extra expansion of Page sections. Setting the Page section height with a Binding to a larger value than the default one may result in other unpredictable behavior. The height of the Page section must not depend on the data rendered on the page. The logic behind is that the Page Section height is estimated prior to evaluating the corresponding page data as the Reporting engine needs to calculate the available space on each page before rendering the data on it.

Move content to report-header

If you need to display the content only on the first page, it can be placed inside the report header section instead, which has expanding height. This will result in the report-header to expand if the content expands.

Ensure space for expanding

Make sure the element has enough space to grow. Attempt simulating the different possibilities of the element content and make sure the element can grow to accommodate this increase in space.

Create static report-group for page-header content

Create a static report-group and use that group's header for the content instead of page header. In the static report-group the grouping is set to a constant value, which will result in the data preserving it's structure while providing functionality for automatically height-adjusting headers. The Page Functions is not available in these group headers.

Read about how to add a group to a report to set this up, and ensure the PrintOnEveryPage property is set to true.

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