Method Community

When creating a new report, I noticed that the report will render very differently between the design view and preview view in Report Designer and the actual, live 'Print Preview' inside MethodCRM.  This is creating a world of OCD-aggravating problems for me.

For example -- drawn lines will change width or height; labels will drift out of position (sometimes dramatically), and font styling will either get stripped or altered.  What's worse, is that some of these rendering issues can actually change report to report -- one customer estimate's header fields may be in one place, and the next customer's estimate's fields may be 30+ pixels off in another direction.  

I can't predict any of this behavior by using the preview pane in Report Designer.

I could care less about some of these issues when it comes to internal report usage, but this is a huge problem for our estimates and invoice forms, and customer-facing forms. 

So, to the question:  What are some common mistakes or overlooked issues that can cause this?

Are there some 'best practices' that can be used to prevent styling problems?  Or is this all just an unfortunate bug or limitation of the Report Designer?

Hi sbonner,

I haven't seen the behaviour you seem to be experiencing, other than the design view not having all of data the generated report would have. This is due to the Generate Report action having the ability to filter data before the report is generated. A couple of tips I can think are:

1) Make sure none of the objects are outside of the boundries of the report. Even if a line or a text box is a pixel out of bounds, it can throw the layout of the report off.

2) Make use of the location and size fields on the property box. If you are dragging and dropping the objects, this area will allow you to more accurately place the objects. Lines and boxes can appear joined when in the designer, but are actually off when the report is generated.

3) For transaction templates, run some test transactions (estimates, invoices) to see how the reports look before sending out to customers. This can help if the data in designer preview might be different than the actual print preview.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any other complaints about what you are describing. nor experienced this myself.

Hope this helps.

- Adam

Hi Adam!

Thank you for the response!

I found out that a lot of my issues were caused by using fonts which were not supported on Method's servers.  I don't know how I missed this given that it's the first link on your help pages for Report Designer.  

I also tried using property fields to realign lines and fields, and this did seem to solve all of my drifting issues.