Printing a List after Creating it (SAP Library - BC

Printing a List after Creating it

When printing a list after creating it, you do not use any of the print-specific statements described in the topics below to send the list from within the program to the SAP spool system.

By default, the system sends the completed list to the output screen. If the Print function (function code PRI) in the status of the user interface for the list has been activated, the user can send the screen list to the SAP spool system by choosing Print (see Printing Output Lists). The system requests the print parameters in the Print Screen List dialog box (see Print Parameters). For information about how to change the default values on this screen, refer to Print Parameters - Setting Default Values.

Printing a list after creating it has the following problems:

The list is formatted for screen display, and not for printing. This is not always suitable for printing, for the following reasons:

- A list on an output screen usually consists of a single page (see notes in Setting the Page Length). When printing, the system 'cuts' this logical page into several physical pages whose format depends on the print parameters specified. The system places the page header on each of these print pages. If the page header contains a page number, this number is the same on all pages (SY-PAGNO). This means that you cannot number the pages.

- If the list contains page breaks programmed using NEW-PAGE (see Unconditional Page Breaks), these page breaks are not adapted to the format of the print pages, which may lead to further automatic page breaks. For a print page created by an automatic page break, the system uses the same page header as for the previous page, since only NEW-PAGE increases the system field SY-PAGNO.

- If the list consists of several pages due to the LINE-COUNT option in the REPORT or NEW-PAGE statement (see Lists with Several Pages), you can either not print the list at all, since the page length specified exceeds the maximum page length of a print page, or you do not make full use of the physical print page.

- You can set the width of a list on an output screen to any value between 1 and 255 columns (see Setting the List Width). This list width is not adapted to a printer format. For example, a normal printer prints lists wider than 132 columns with the same small letter size as lists of 255 columns because there is no print format in between.

When creating a list for screen output, you cannot include print control statements into the list (see Print Control).

You cannot output footer lines defined in the program at the end of each printed page. However, you can instead select Footer line in the Print Screen List dialog box. The system then reserves one line on each page for the system-defined footer line.

Screen lists do not contain any index information for optical archiving. You can only create index information for optical archiving while the list is being created (see Indexing Print Lists for Optical Archiving).

The printout of a completed list from the output screen is a hard copy of the screen rather than a real program-controlled printout. Use this method for testing purposes only, or for lists whose formats are acceptable to the printer. You should print complex lists (like lists with extensive page headers that should not appear on each printed page) from the program (see Printing a List During Creation).

If you want to offer the user the possibility of starting a program-controlled print process from the output screen, use the methods of interactive reporting (see User Actions on Lists). For example, you first create a list for the output screen. Use a user interface of your own in which you replace function code PRI with a different function code. You can then recreate the list for the spool system in the AT USER-COMMAND event (see Printing a List During Creation).