Some tips for legacy report designers

This table answers some common questions the correlation between Report Designer and traditional 4GL commands in reports:

Table 1. Legacy Report to Genero Report Writer
Legacy Report command	Using Genero Report Writer
SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE	In the report design document, drop a container that will consume the remainder of the page. See Forcing a page break.
BEFORE GROUP OF, AFTER GROUP OF	There is a GROUP trigger for data control breaks in the report structure. The position and contents of the child containers of the trigger determine what is printed out and when. See Group and Report totals.
ON EVERY ROW	In the ON EVERY ROW statement of the BDL file, the PRINT statement just sends the data items to the report engine. The report design document specifies what is to be printed out for every row of data passed to the report.
SPACES, format strings	All of the formatting for the report line is done in the report design document. These keywords are no longer used in a PRINT statement in the BDL file.
PRINT	In the report design document, the Data View tab displays the list of data items in the order in which they are specified in the PRINT statement.
ON LAST ROW	Drop a container positioned as the last child of the page root. The contents of the container will print out after the last report row. See Report Total.
NEED n LINES	Put all the report elements that need to be kept together in a Vertical Box Layout Node container. If there is not sufficient room on the page to print all of the elements in the container, the entire container will be printed on the next page.
PAGE HEADER, PAGE FOOTER	Avoid using these control breaks, which are triggered by the line count of the BDL report, which does not correspond with the actual page breaks in the report output by Report Writer. Create page headers and footers in the report design document instead.