Recently I received an email wondering…
When printing a multipage report sorted by a sub-summary, is there a way to display the sub-summary heading on the following page when it breaks across two or more pages?
There are various approaches one might take, and I actually buried one of those approaches inside an article + demo file posted on this site back in 2013 (PDF Catalog with Table of Contents). At the time we didn’t have “Hide Object” so I used conditional formatting in conjunction with a special-purpose “helper field” to flexibly display the conditional heading.
Well today we’re going look at an approach that doesn’t require a helper field, and you are welcome to follow along in this demo file if you are so inclined: conditional-summary-report-header.zip
First let’s be clear on the problem. We have a report showing products grouped by vendor, and if we’re lucky, a given vendor’s entries will all appear on a single page, immediately preceded by the vendor name, like so:
…but when that is not the case, because the vendor’s products are split across two or more pages, FileMaker defaults to this on subsequent pages…
…but we’re going to coerce our report into displaying this instead.
Here’s the report in layout mode, with Hide Object configured to conditionally hide the faux vendor header.
In a nutshell, the Hide Object syntax says to always hide the faux header, except when a) previewing or printing, and b) even then, only show it when the vendor subheading has already appeared on a previous page.