Section Areas

Chapter 8 - Customizing Sections
Mastering Crystal Reports 9
by Cate McCoy and Gord Maric
Sybex 2003

When you first create a report, five section bands are automatically added to your layout area as if it were an 8 1/2" by 11" piece of paper.

• Report Header

• Page Header

• Details

• Report Footer

• Page Footer

  Tip 

  The bands are also referred to as areas in the Crystal Reports help file.

These bands are depicted in Figure 8.1 as if they were laid out on a piece of paper and in Figure 8.2 as they would appear in Crystal’s design area. When the report is previewed or printed, the information in the Report Header and Report Footer will each appear once in the report: at the very top of the report and at the very end of the report. Page Headers and Footers will appear once per page. Notice in the layout that the Page Footer is the last section, not the Report Footer. The information in the Page Footer prints in a very small margin at the bottom of each page; this puts it visually below the Report Footer, which will print directly after the last bits of data in the Details section. The Details section is where each record or row of data from the data source will be placed; its size is determined by the number of records retrieved from the data source.

Figure 8.1. Band layout

Figure 8.2. Bands in Design mode

The simple report in Figure 8.2 was created with the Standard Report Creation Wizard. The wizard automatically suppresses the Report Header and Report Footer. The fact that these two sections are currently hidden is reflected in the different background markings: The two sections are cross-hatched with gray lines.

Note 

The Report Header and Report Footer are not automatically hidden when you build a blank report manually instead of using the Standard Report Creation Wizard.

Sections that are not hidden have a plain white background. This is the designer’s visual clue that a section has been hidden. If you prefer, you can change this feature so that hidden sections do not display in your report at all, regardless of the hatch marks. To set a report option to control whether the section displays during your design work, choose File > Options, and on the Layout tab, shown in Figure 8.3, and select the Show Hidden Sections option. With this option enabled, the gray hatch marks appear; with it disabled, the section will not display at all in Design mode.

Figure 8.3. Designer settings

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