Link with Band

Occasionally, depending on the number and size of bands in your report, you may get pages that have group header bands at the end of a page. Its corresponding detail bands are then printed on the following pages as illustrated in the figure below.

There are two pages illustrated here. The first page shows a group header at the bottom of the page with no detail bands below it. The second page shows that the detail bands were moved to the next page without their group header.

In other cases, a page will have just enough room to print the last Detail Band. The Group Footer Band will be printed on the following page by itself as seen in the figure below.

This image shows the Group Footer Band at the top of the second page.

Lonely Group Header Band

To format your report so that group header and footer bands appear with their data on the same page, use the “Link with Band” feature. This feature is available for all band types.

To use the "Link with Band" feature, set the link inside the band that comes first, and link that band to the very next band (e.g., link the group header to the detail band).

To fix a lonely group header:

  1. Right-click on the group header and select Edit to launch the group header edit dialog.
  2. From the "Link with band" drop-down, select the detail band for the group header.
  3. Click OK to exit the dialog.

Edit Band dialog box where the Group Header is linked to the Detail Band using the Link with Band option.

Setting the link in the header band forces the header band to the page with the linked detail band (as shown in the image below). In this case, the group header band is linked to the detail band “Detailband”. Notice how there is still room for more data on page 1, but the second group header is printed on the next page.

This image shows the corrected output with Group Header 2 at the top of the second page.

Note: The linking must be done on the band that prints first-- it will not work if you attempt to link the detail band back to the group header band.

Lonely Group Footer Band

In the case of the lonely group footer, you would set "Link with band" in the detail band because the group footer band comes after the detail band.

To fix a lonely group footer:

  1. Right-click on the detail band and select Edit to launch the detail band edit dialog.
  2. From the "Link with band" drop-down, select the footer band for your group header.
  3. Click OK to exit the dialog.

Edit Band dialog box where the Detail Band is linked to the Group Footer Band using the Link With Band option.

Setting the link in the header band forces the last record of the detail band to the next page, so that it can appear with the footer band (as shown in the image below). In this case, the detail band was configured to link with the Footer 1 band. Notice that there is still room for more data on page 1, yet the last detail record for group 1 is not printed until page 2 with its group footer.

The corrected output without a lonely group footer. The group footer is printed near the top of the second page.