Well, in the process doing extensive testing of PDF output in 4.3 we came upon an issue that we think we need to deal with. It’s not a new issue but does cause some problems. The problem is that the LABEL and RAWTEXT widget types are being treated the same. If you have an alpha or text field defined as a RAWTEXT widget it will act as a LABEL. Vertically centering, doing html formatting, etc. Actually even if you have no widget defined you still get the html formatted instead of raw.

We feel the solution to this is to have No widget and RAWTEXT widgets act similar and that they should not do HTML formatting, should not default to vertically center, etc. By default they should print their content from upper left to lower right in raw format.

Obviously this will change the behavior of reports you already have written. We think this can be easily fixed by having APPX search your applications on upgrade for PDF reports that have RAWTEXT widgets define switching them to LABEL widgets. That way they will continue to function as they do today but we gain the ability to print raw unformatted data.

Let us know what you think about this if you have an opinion.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 11:01 am and is filed under Pete, Research & Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.