Oleander Tips & Tricks

You can not place two bookmarks touching one another. There has at least to be a space between them. This is true for groups, too. During the print process these bookmarks will be erased temporarely. WinWord then expands the remaining bookmark to span the whole content that the two bookmarks had before, leading to confusion in most cases.

As you can see in the Mastapp demo database Paradox allows fieldnames with spaces or special characters in them. These fieldnames will be converted by Delphi and you can not use them as Oleander identifiers. It is easy, though, to map them to usable names using the DatafieldMap property of the OleanderController.

If you include a pagebrake at the end of a group to create a new page for every record of the group, WinWord will create one empty page at the end of the printed document. This page can not be deleted by Oleander and will be printed.

In Word8 the default when inserting graphics has changed. Word8 does not anchor the graphic at the cursor position. If you need to embed the graphic into the text you have to click the graphic and open the format graphic dialog. Uncheck the ‘lay over text’ switch. Perhaps you need to write a macro to switch lots of graphics.

It is no problem to insert a field more than once into a document. Oleander only needs the first two parts of a bookmarks name to identify the datasource and field to print it. Just name the first bookmark ‘customer_name_1’ and the second ‘customer_name_2’. Word is happy and Oleander inserts the customer name in both.

If you have bitmaps in your database and Delphi inserts TBlobFields into your application but not TGraphicField, you just have to set the blobtype property of the TBlobField to ftGraphic to print the bitmap.

To speed up printing with both Word7 and Word8 just open a menue while Oleander prints ! Don’t select anything, just open the menue. The printing will continue with increased speed. This is especially true with Word8 under Win95. We don’t know what causes this, but will have a look.

Oleander Known Problems

WinWord 7 signals "Not enough memory" when printing the Mastapp "Invoice" document. WinWord 8 runs without problems.

An OLE controlled WinWord 7 under Win95 runs faster than WinWord 8. WinWord 8  does not accept and/or execute OLE-commands fast enough. Oleander sends VB commands as fast as possible, but Word "takes it real slow".

Due to a bug in WinWord 7 you can place bookmarks in the header and footer part of the document, but they can’t be seen neither by Oleander nor by WinWord itself. Therefore you can’t use them for printing in Oleander. WinWord 8 fixes that bug and prints them fine. See the "Order History" document of the Oleander demo Application. Find more information in the Microsoft knowledge base reference number Q113758.