Date:         Mon, 16 Jun 2003 08:58:47 -0700
Reply-To:     Carey Smoak <carey.smoak@ROCHE.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Carey Smoak <carey.smoak@ROCHE.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com/
Subject:      long text fields and proc report
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi SAS-Lers,

I have a question about long text fields (say greater than 200
characters) and proc report.  I am doing a report with several fields
(columns) and one of the fields in a long text field (a comment
field).  In order to fit all of the fields on the page, I use a macro
to break-up the long text field into several pieces.  For example, I
may have a comment that is 210 characters in length and I use the
macro to split it into lengths of 35 characters.  This would mean that
I would need 7 lines in the report to fit this comment.  Of course the
length of this comment field varies from subject to subject, so not
every comment will be broken into 7 pieces.

The problem is that when I use proc report, some of the text may print
on the bottom of one page and then continue on to the next page.  For
example, the if a comment has 7 lines (after breaking it into smaller
pieces), the first 2 lines may print on the bottom of one page and
then the next 5 lines at the top of the next page.  What I want to
know is if there is a way to force proc report to print all of the
lines on one page.  In other words, if all of the lines won't fit at
the bottom of a page then it would print them all on the next page.

I do know how to do this using data _null_, but my manager wants me to
use proc report (if possible) for this task.  Thank you in advance for
your assistance.

Carey G. Smoak
Senior Clinical Programmer Analyst
Roche Molecular Systems, Inc.
4300 Hacienda Drive
Pleasanton, CA 94588
carey.smoak@roche.com