domObj.fillFromNextPage
Deprecated Function
The best way to achieve multi-column output, since 3.0.003.20, is to use the facility built right into Design. No scripting is required. In that scenario, you have a full-width parent pane that has one or more relatively narrow child panes. In the pane object properties of the parent pane you check Layout in multiple columns.
Having done that, Merge will automatically wrap all of that parent's child Panes, that were instantiated at Data Merge time, into as many columns as can fit in the parent Pane. It will do pagination. It will ensure that the last set of columns are balanced -- i.e. area as much as possible of equal length.
(Merge only)
This is used for two-column output. The domObj must be a Group object. This function will fill the Group with the objects that flowed into the next page.
Syntax
domObj.fillFromNextPage()
Returned Value
Nothing directly, but the domObj is updated.
Parameters
The real parameter is the domObj itself, which must be a Group object.
Description
This is used to produce two-column, page-long, output. If you persist, good background to this obsolete feature, even if that background is outdated, is in the PaneTalk article Multi-Column Layout.
You design a form as usual except that you make all the panes quite narrow, i.e. only half-or-less the width of the page (as you would imagine if one is going to make it two columns wide). On the right-hand side of the container, you draw a group box that represents where the second column is going to go. So, one has a bunch of flowing, half-width, panes down the left and a tall group box down the right-hand side. The group box must end at the bottom of the container.
The only code is in the Pagination Completed event of the group. It is merely:
this.fillFromNextPage();
That's it. The narrow panes will flow as usual, in fact they will overflow the page and onto the next page — temporarily that is. Then at Pagination Completed time, fillFromNextPage() will pull all the panes on the next page into the area defined by the group box. Subsequently, when the Pagination Completed event processing is done on that next page, it will be detected that the page no longer has any panes, and hence the page will be marked as invisible and not-counted (essentially deleted). So now, two pages have been folded into one page with two columns.
This is useful only when doing two columns on an entire page, not for two columns within some section of a page. It relies on the pagination algorithm being able to do its thing with respect to overflowing panes, inserting headers, etcetera. Whatever panes are instantiated in the next page will be pulled into the right-hand group of the current page. This also means that it is critical that the group's height and the container's height match.
