How can I print a standard "back page" from a Crystal Report

If you are running multiple invoices in one run, I would enhance on wykabryan's recommendation and stick them in the group footer (report being grouped on invoice number or something similar).

wykabryan: New Page Before / After are greyed out on the page footer sections. And it is has checked New Page After. I believe this is  standard for these sections.

One thing I tried was adding a second Detail section, then puting New Page Before but it does not seem to recognize this., i.e. it does not go to new page.

I'm using CRXI - Developer edition)

Doug.. You dont want to do this in the page footer. You want this in the Report Footer.

Go report>Section export. Click on Report Footer. Then at the top click on insert. You will now see two section. on Report Footer A click on New Page After.

LinInDenver: That would not work if there were exactly 1 page per invoice group.

I need a back page on every page of the report. i.e. every alternate page does not have any details, just the text.

wykabryan: Using Report footer would only put the text on the last page of the report. I need the text on every alternate page of the report.

LinInDenver: Correction ... I meant using group footer would NOT work if there were more than 1 page of invoice details.

Hi Doug - if you are grouping on  INVOICE, having your standard footer in the group footer would force it for each invoice.

If you choose new page before and new page after on your group footer section, I think you will get the desired effect.

page one
invoice group header -- Invoice 100
invoice detail line -- blah blah blah blah
invoice detail line -- la la la la la

page two
invoice group footer -- disclaimer text

page three
invoice group header -- invoice 101
and so on..

good luck.

Also - using a group footer should work if you have multiple invoice pages, so long as you are grouping by invoice.

group footers only display once you have reached the end of a grouping.
page footers display on all pages, and report footers display only on last page of the entire report.

When the PHb is too tall you will get an error that something is too big to fit on a page.

mlmcc

LinInDenver,

 I think you're missing his point.  He wants this printed on the back of every page, including every page of a multi-page invoice.  The invoice group footer would only put it on the back of the last page for each invoice.

 James

A few years ago, I played with a proof of concept for handling exactly that type of scenario in my software and it works very nicely.  I already had the ability to automatically export to pdf and print the pdf. I added one more step in the middle where the code inserted a desired 1-page pdf file (in your case, it's the invoice back page) after each page in the original pdf export, before printing the resulting pdf.

If you can't find a solution within Crystal, you could approach the problem in the same way.

PCIIain - that's an interesting idea but does not seem to work when there is more than one page of details for a group. On those pages, the subreport does not print - instead it seems to print the rest of the details in the header section of what should be the back page... At least, that what I thought until I tweaked the size of the subreport in minute ways. There is a magic size at which the subreport occupies the entirety of the back page and yet the details print properly in the next page.

Still testing but looks good. I don't think it is respecting the "New page after" in the headers and footers properly. I've done so many combos right now I have to verify what exactly works. Best so far is to have a big detail section in the subreport that is just the right size.

IdoMillet - That's cool. What technology did you use to modify the PDF in this way? (I'm using Delphi)

No new page after in the headers. Just in the group footer. Remember to reset page number after group footer as well. (Lets you number the pages of the invoice...)

I did a limited test and it seemed to work O.K for me. You DO need to ensure that the detail section is the only usable section of the subreport, and that it's the same size as the printable area.

Please don't give up on doing this just via Crystal.  However, in case that option doesn't work for you I just implemented the automated
[Crystal -> PDF Export -> Interweave with BackPage PDF -> Printer]
approach in my software (Visual CUT) and can confirm it works.  

If you decide to implement this approach in your own code, keep in mind that you can leverage the ability of pdf files to "clone" content, so speed and final pdf file size are optimized. In my code, I load the BackPage pdf into memory only once and then clone it multiple times into the back pages of the Crystal report pdf export. This makes the process very fast and it doesn't matter how many pages the Crystal export to pdf contains -- the size of the final pdf grows as if we add the BackPage only once...  :o)

Did you try my idea of using the page header.

It seemed to work for me.

mlmcc

mlmcc, I did try but I think I did not try hard enough to make the spacing fit exactly. I got it to work in the subreport approach from PCIIain. I suspect it will work both ways. Key thing is getting the space just right. I am splitting the points. Thanks to all

You are correct on the spacing.  It took me a bit to get it just right.  A little too large or small and it does't work.

mlmcc