Access Cookbook

Keep a Report from Breaking at an Inappropriate Place

Problem

On some of your reports, you use the Keep Together property to keep a whole group together or to ensure that a group header won’t print without at least one detail item. When detail items are long, you may not want to keep an entire detail item together; however, you do want to have a reasonable number of lines under the header so that the header won’t be the last line on the report page. How do you make a report start a new page instead of printing the group header with just a single detail line at the bottom of a page?

Solution

You can use an event procedure called from a report’s Format event to evaluate the length of a report page before it actually prints and take an action (in this case, activating a page break control) only if certain criteria are met. This technique uses the acbConditionalBreak function and a page break control. This solution demonstrates how to use acbConditionalBreak to force a page break if there is not enough room to print at least one line of text from the detail section under a group header.

Open 03-14.MDB and print the report rptBadBreaks. This typical business-address report, which has its detail section’s KeepTogether property set to Yes, occasionally prints a page with the Category group header as the last line of the page, as shown in Figure 3-33.

Figure 3-33. Page 2 of rptBadBreaks ...