Tricks of the Trade: MEDITECH NPR (Client Server) – NPR Report Page Trailer Placement - Part 1 of 2

By: John Sharpe, President, Comstock Software, Inc.

Word processing programs like Microsoft Word are the product of almost 30 years of incremental, yet continuous design, development, and testing. These programs have made document design and creation so simple, that you and I take for granted all that goes on behind the scenes.

This makes it all the more difficult for us, to understand why the NPR report writer, just doesn’t quite do things the way you think it would. Take for example the page trailer. A page trailer sounds like it would come at the bottom of a page, but does what it should though, by coming at the end of the detail & any other report sections you’ve included in the report.

This sample report demonstrates the scenario. The report contains a page header, a detail line and a page trailer.

To get the page trailer down to the bottom of the page, you can manually insert detail (D) lines until you have enough on the page.

But … if you want to change the page parameters at a later time, you have to go back and manually figure out how many lines are just enough to push the trailer to the bottom, without overflowing to the next page.

You’re busy – who has time to make manual adjustments every time the users of the report need a change?

Using a footnote to hard-code the number of lines in the page trailer and a line attribute to dynamically print the correct number of lines...

...your page trailer now appears at the bottom of the page.

Here’s where using a line attribute pays off, you can add horizontal lines, much like the lines on a yellow legal pad, by changing only 1 character in the line attribute.

Presto! Now you have just the right number of lines.

The point of our exercise here isn’t necessarily to print horizontal rule, but to gain a deeper understanding of the NPR Report Writer and how you can manipulate the placement of the page trailer using a line attribute. Next time you need to build a bunch of check boxes, or can’t quite get the bottom of the page where you need it, you’ll be able reach back through the cobwebs and come up with a new solution of your own based on this new knowledge.

In the meantime, won't you join your colleagues in asking and answering questions at the MEDITECH Knowledge Exchange?  Thoughts? Email them to John at jsharpe@comstock-software.com.

John Sharpe is President / NPR Consultant at Comstock Software, Inc. Learn more about NPR Report Writing at the MEDITECH NPR Report Writing Blog.