Clerk Resources - Attendance Rolls - Repeat Header Row

Clerks can print attendance rolls for organizations via Clerk Resources > Reports > Attendance Rolls. The only problem is for organizations that are more than one page, the date header rows are not repeated on subsequent pages. That makes printing rolls via lds.org almost useless. MLS rolls print the date header rows on each page. Is there a way to get the date header rows to appear on subsequent pages from lds.org Clerk Resources? If not, can one of the software developers respond to this post to indicate if this is a known problem that is in the queue to be fixed at some point?

This thread also pointed that out along with the gridlines being too faint.
The issues were being evaluated.

http://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php ... ls&p=67206#

jla59 wrote:This thread also pointed that out... http://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php ... ls&p=67206#

Where in that thread does it point out this issue? That thread appears to be about grid lines being too faint. I don't see any mention of repeating the date header row on multi-page rolls. Other than the fact that they both are bugs with attendance rolls, I don't see the tie-in.

genman wrote:

jla59 wrote:This thread also pointed that out... http://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php ... ls&p=67206#

Where in that thread does it point out this issue? That thread appears to be about grid lines being too faint. I don't see any mention of repeating the date header row on multi-page rolls. Other than the fact that they both are bugs with attendance rolls, I don't see the tie-in.

It's somewhere in the middle of post #3: "I also noticed that the online version of the attendance roll doesn't carry over the Month/Day Column labels onto the 2nd page."

It is little things like faint grid lines and day header row not carrying over in attendance rolls, and those issues being known about and unfixed for more than a year that seems to indicate we are a long long way from MLS being phased-out and it all being done on LDS.org. Those are little things, but they indicate the product is far from being a mature baseline towards an MLS replacement. At this rate, I would guess 4 more years at the earliest.

These are known issues, and they are in our backlog to be addressed. However, I admit they are lower priority at the moment.

I don't know that we have announced a schedule for phasing-out MLS. Your prediction of "4 more years at the earliest" may be correct.

The attendance rolls lines are darker now.

I'm still working on a solution for repeating the header row. The underlying PDF generator doesn't currently support repeating table headers, so I'm looking into some workarounds as I have time.

A couple of people have let the discussion of repeating header rows wander off to a tangential discussion of faint grid lines. That's unfortunate.

Please keep the discussion to one issue per topic. This topic is only about repeating header rows.

Any discussion of the faint grid lines should should be only in the topic Printing attendance rolls: grid lines light.

jkitterman wrote:I'm still working on a solution for repeating the header row. The underlying PDF generator doesn't currently support repeating table headers

I appreciate your effort on this. What are you using for the underlying PDF generator?

We researched a lot of PDF generators and converters, including commercial, open source, and combinations of both. We settled on using wkhtmltopdf for a variety of reasons. It uses WebKit for layout and rendering.

One drawback with WebKit is that it doesn't support repeating the table header when a page break occurs inside a table. This is a problem when printing in the WebKit-based browsers as well (Safari, Chrome, etc). The feature was requested in the WebKit project in 2008, but hasn't gained much traction.

So, we'll need to come up with a workaround.

jkitterman wrote:So, we'll need to come up with a workaround.

Such as breaking the table into page-sized tables? As in run x number of lines, then start a new table?

jkitterman wrote:One drawback with WebKit is that it doesn't support repeating the table header

I see what you mean in the Webkit bug report.

jkitterman wrote:So, we'll need to come up with a workaround.

The workaround is going to be time consuming and brittle probably. Webkit is open source software. It seems like it may be more efficient for someone to just volunteer to fix this for Webkit. It is a huge flaw. I don't know why anyone hasn't fixed it already in Webkit. Looks like the last user comment in the bug report from just a couple weeks ago was someone considering doing just that. Anybody on these LDS Tech boards want to take a crack at it? If you do, this link has instructions on how you go about signing up to contribute code.

russellhltn wrote:

jkitterman wrote:So, we'll need to come up with a workaround.

Such as breaking the table into page-sized tables? As in run x number of lines, then start a new table?

Yes, something like that. We need to deal with different paper sizes too, so maybe even some javascript to calculate the paper size (letter, a4), and the printable region, and automatically close and open a new table. I just need to find the time to do it. A lot of our printed reports need that feature, not just the rolls.

genman wrote:It seems like it may be more efficient for someone to just volunteer to fix this for Webkit.

I've considered that too. Starring this issue in Chromium ( http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issue ... l?id=24826 ) might even help.

We could also look for a different PDF generator. They all have pros and cons, though.