| SQR Document Sections | KEVIN RESCHENBERG
09-20-2006 |
A reader sent a question about a problem he was having
with BEGIN-DOCUMENT in SQR. Now, I admit that I've never
even used document sections before and so decided to take a
look at them. In the process I found that they can be
useful but a little tricky.
A document section is intended to describe a one-page
letter or statement. It's a form that contains text and variables,
and the values of the variables are merged into the document
before it is printed.
begin-document (1,1)
Dear &name
.b
This is to inform you that...
end-document
In this example, the letter begins
at position (1,1) on the page. "Dear" is followed by
the value of the &name variable. String $variables
and numeric #variables can also be used. The ".b" indicates a blank
line. The text is presented exactly as shown.
Since ".b" is required to force a blank line,
this would seem to imply that short lines would be merged
together and long lines would wrap. But the
only thing that seems to happen is that blank lines are
ignored.
Relative positioning is allowed, so you can begin the
document at a position such as (+1,1). However, this
can lead to problems. When the page fills up, a new
page is not started. It appears that SQR assumes you
will be doing one document per page and therefore have
coded a NEW-PAGE somewhere. If not, then the document(s)
will just overflow the page and an error will result.
Documents can be useful in lining up columns. However, that
leads to another type of problem. Consider this:
begin-document
&name
&address
&city, &state &postal WRONG
end-document
The problem here is that the positions of
the state and postal fields are fixed. The value of &STATE
will print in column 8 in this example. This means that the
state will overlap the city, and there will be 6 blank
spaces after the state before the postal (zip) code prints.
SQR provides a way out of this. You can code a document marker
and then position to it and execute PRINT statements:
begin-document
&name
&address
@city_state_zip
end-document
position () @city_state_zip
print &city ()
print ', ' ()
print &state ()
print ' ' ()
print &postal ()
But it would seem much easier just to
create a separate $city_state_zip variable and print that
in the document.
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