Is there a good way (or any way) to get breadcrumbs to print in a header of an Advanced PDF. For example, if printing a number of records similar to a dictionary, and you want to print the first word appearing on this page on the top of the page (and possibly the last as well). Example:

p1

Apple - Bar

apple: …..

artist: …..

bar: …..

p2

Board - Cube

board: …..

brisket: ….

cube: ….

I was thinking of storing the first label (Apple, Board) in a variable, and referencing the variable in the macro for the header, but this doesn’t work…

The tricky part is that pagination is really only a feature of BFO. Freemarker does not even know that the template being used will be multi-page or not. It could just as easily be a single page HTML output instead of a PDF. So, the only way to make it work is to set a limit for the # of record per page, and forcibly page break every so often with a pbr tag (https://bfo.com/products/report/docs/tags/tags/pbr.html). You’ll likely have some wasted space on each page, though, and it may take trial and error to get good results.

so, basically, paginate yourself, then you’re in control. but cannot do so with straight up macro/header

correct, as far as I know, it’s the only way

i find it hard to believe nobody has overcome this - if building a catalog of sorts out of Netsuite, you would have likely hit this requirement… without being in total control (it’s too hard to predict the length of the page, unless you overestimate and end up like you said with lots of whitespace)

i have no idea if the macro can be redefined dynamically. But yes, the fact that BFO and Freemarker are two separate and distinct stages of the output make this challenging.

😩

After Freemarker has processed the template, it is still just a single page HTML document. Remember that they are Advanced PDF/HTML templates, and the output could be either HTML or PDF.

💯 just challenging

BFO only runs if the output will be PDF, so it is not even guaranteed to happen. But, when it does, all Freemarker variables at that point have been substituted with static values. BFO is only processing a static document, not a template. Therefore, it is just about impossible for Freemarker to signal anything to BFO

yup, understood and thanks. but there’s GOTTA be a way. 🙂

i think the way to do it would be to use a different PDF generation tool/method/service, one that isn’t; trying to support both HTML and PDF at the same time (HTML being non-paged)

so, basically, the recommended way to approach this is to use

thead

which repeats on pages! this may work for me. thanks

interesting, did not not know BFO repeats thead on every page. That’s nice that it does

yaknow i guess it depends how you set it up. the idea is that you set up a table with a thead per title… if you need a certain title to repeat on each page, then update as you go to the next one, if the underlying thead is updated with the new value you will get that repeated on the next page

Good to know there is at least some option, and that BFO prints the

thead

on every page (and

tfoot

, too, apparently). Hopefully, with those there is some path towards making this work. Obviously it still doesn’t make it easy, but hopefully not impossible