Livecycle

To control subform and subform set breaks by using conditional statements

LiveCycle Designer ES provides the capability to create customized conditional breaks for repeating subform objects. As opposed to paginating in response to data overflow, conditional breaks allow you to manually control how a subform breaks in a form based on a series of checks called conditional statements.

Through the conditional statements, you can verify data for a field within a repeating subform against previous instances of that field. The repeating subform can then be broken in response to a change in the data supplied to the field.

For example, on a telephone bill, you could break a repeating subform in response to changes in the field that stores the date of each billing entry. The telephone bill could then be visually broken down by date, making it easier for a user to read.

In addition to specifying a breaking condition, you can also specify a leading or trailing subform and indicate where to place the next instance of the repeating subform in the form.

1.	Select a subform or subform set.

2.	In the Object palette, click the Pagination tab.

3.	Click Edit and then click Add to insert a new conditional break list item.

4.	Select a scripting language from the Language list. The conditional break condition statement is created using the scripting language you select.

5.	In the Run At list, select where you want the conditional break to execute.

6.

Click Insert Sample Expression and select the form design object within the subform to use as the comparison field for the conditional break. Alternatively, you can enter your own conditional statement in the field. To correctly evaluate as a conditional break, however, any user-defined conditional statements must evaluate to either true or false. Conditional statements that evaluate to true are executed.

7.	Use one of these options to specify when you want the subform object to break:

•	Select Before to insert a break immediately before the current instance of the subform is inserted into the form.

•	Select After to insert a break immediately after the current instance of the subform is inserted into the form.

8.	In the To field, select where you want to place the remaining occurrences of the broken subform.

9.	In the Trailer and Leader lists, select trailer and leader subforms to use for the current conditional break, if any.

10.	Repeat steps 2 to 8 for each conditional break that you want to include for the selected subform.

11.	Click OK when you have finished adding entries to the list.

After you create all of your conditional break entries, you should review the order in which they appear in the Edit Conditional Breaks dialog box. LiveCycle Designer ES processes the conditional breaks specified in the Edit Conditional Breaks dialog box in sequential order from top to bottom. Each conditional break for which the conditional statement evaluates to true is executed.

Use the Up and Down buttons to move individual conditional break list entries into the preferred order.

See also 

Edit Conditional Breaks dialog box

Subform properties in the Pagination tab

About calculations and scripts

To control subform and subform set breaks by using conditional statements