[reportlab-users] RE: ActionFlowable usage

[Marc Stober]

Hi Pascal,

I am doing this in a report I've created.

# 1: I've created my own action-flowable-like class as follows:
class TitleChanger(Flowable):
    """ Change the section title from page to page. """
    def __init__(self, section, title):
        self.section = section
        self.title = title
        Flowable.__init__(self)
    def wrap(self, availWidth, availHeight):
        """ Doesn't take up any space. """
        return (0, 0)
    def draw(self):
        self.section.title = self.title

Note that "section" should be based on PageTemplate object, as shown below.
Also, I didn't base this on ActionFlowable because, well, when I wrote this
I hadn't discovered ActionFlowable yet; it might be something you can
improve upon.

#2. I've overridden the beforeDrawPage method of PageTemplate something like
this:
class Section(PageTemplate):
    def beforeDrawPage(self, canvas, document):
	canvas.drawString(...

There are some examples in the ReportLab docs of using the beforeDrawPage
method of PageTemplate to create headers. I'm not familiar with the
handle_page_begin method that you used.

#3. Then I just add my TitleChanger flowable to the list of flowables as I
build it.

Hope this helps. Perhaps the RL staff will respond with an even better
solution.

Marc
mstober@dalbar.com