Posted by a ceTe Software moderator
You can use either ReportWriter or Generator to create PDF reports from stored procedures. Because ReportWriter handles pagination as well as headers and footers of the report automatically the coding that it takes to create a PDF report using ReportWriter can usually be simpler, but at the same time ReportWriter has its limitations. One of those limitations that ReportWriter has is that it will not split any of the records (as you mentioned in your original post that you had a record that was spilling off the page because it was so long). This is just a current limitation.
Because of this limitation of ReportWriter, we suggested that you use or Generator product. With Generator no pagination or section handling is built into the product, so the coding will be a little more extensive, but using the Generator product you have complete control over every element in your report. This means that if as you are building your report (using Generator) you come to a record that does not fit on a page you can place the text that will fit on the first page and overflow the rest on the to next and continue this for all the overflow as needed.
As you mentioned before, yes Generator is included with ReportWriter. But you see that there is no way to interrupt a PDF while it is being created with ReportWriter to use some logic from Generator. In other words you need to either create the entire report with ReportWriter (knowing certain limitations) or create the entire report with Generator (knowing you have control over all the coding).
Because your records, in some cases, may contain data that is too long to fit on an entire page you will need to use Generator not ReportWriter. ReportWriter is very useful when you when you know that there will never be any one record in your stored procedure that will take up more than one entire page.
Thanks,
ceTe Software Support Team