I had a bit of a mystery this past week. A customer wanted to suppress a series of vertical lines in the page header, based on a condition (a field being null). SAP just added a suppress condition button for lines and boxes in the latest version of CR, CR 2016, so I figured it would be simple.

But when I put the condition formula in for one of the lines, it did not suppress when it should. I applied the same condition to the next vertical line and it worked as expected, but the first line did not. If I deleted and redrew the line it worked fine, but nothing I could do would get the original line to work.

So I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what was different about the line that didn’t work. I found that while the top end of this line looked like it was in the page header, it was actually a hair higher in the report header. The report header was suppressed.

Normally, suppressing or hiding a section has no affect on formulas. It does affect some other things like subreports and cross-tabs. A hidden/suppressed section will prevent subreports in that section from running. To get a shared variable from a subreport without seeing the subreport requires that we use a ‘stealth’ subreport.  Also, a hidden/suppressed section will prevent a cross-tab from doing any of it’s calculations. But formulas are often put in suppressed sections and they are not normally affected. The suppress formula for a line or a box is an exception, apparently.

So, if you enter a condition formula to suppress a line or a box, and if that line/box has it’s top in a suppressed or hidden section, then the suppress condition will be ignored.  This isn’t true at the bottom of the line/box, only at the top.

One more mystery solved.