I wasn't satisfied with the first solution I came up with. This was because it turned out the footer on my last page could actually be multiple footers and I am dealing with a dynamic form that has a merged data source. I came up with a way to get the footer correctly at the bottom of the last page using a few extra objects and javascript. My form is in a flow layout and can be 1 or more pages dynamically generated at the runtime. I have it divided into subforms that can dynamically grow. I have no idea what size they will be. My footer can be 1 or many footers that needs to go on the last page so my previous solution will not work well for this since that soultion is a fixed size on the masterpage.
What I did was put my footer object, which is a text field that is bound to an XML node that can repeat 1 or more times, into a subform and placed that in the contentarea of the page. Surrounding this I put my controls that help place the footer properly at the end of the documents last page. So in a subform (name doesn't matter for subform) I placed a text object (text object named: spaceFooter) immediately above the footer subform. And another text object (name doesn't matter for this text object) in a subform (subform named: spaceAfterFooter) immediatley below the footer. Both of these text objects I set to be invisible and made them .01 inches in height, to take up no real visible space, and as wide as the content area. The subforms were set to flowed layout and height property to auto fit. Then I put the following code into a variable script and call it from the documents ready:layout event:
//code that is in the event
MyDoc::ready:layout - (JavaScript, server)
MyDocUtils.positionFooter();
//code that is in variable
MyDocUtils.#variables[0].LetterUtils - (JavaScript, server)
function positionFooter() {
// xfa.log.message(0,"Start positionFooter"); //sends message to log tab for debugging
var subY=0;
var contH=0;
//get the subform that is placed directly after the footer to find out where on the page the footer originally ends
var spaceAfterFooter = getObjectOnLastPage("subform", "spaceAfterFooter");
subY= xfa.layout.y(spaceAfterFooter,"in");
//find the content area height so we know all the space that is available on the page
var contentArea = getObjectOnLastPage("contentArea", "#contentArea");
contH= xfa.layout.h(contentArea,"in");
//set the height of the object that is used for the "spacer"
xfa.layout.relayout();
}
function getObjectOnLastPage(objectType, name) {
var page = xfa.layout.absPageCount() - 1;
var objs = xfa.layout.pageContent(page, objectType);
for (var i=0; i<objs.length; i++) {
var som = objs.item(i).somExpression;
if (som.indexOf(name) != -1){
return objs.item(i);
}
}
return null;
}
So what is happening is the form is first layed out and everything gets placed on the pages the way flow layout would place them. I find out where the very last object on the last page is located, and get its Y position. Then I find out what the total height of the content area is which is the total space I have to work with on the page. By knowing these 2 things I can subtract the y positon from the height of the content area to find out what the amount of space is left at the very end of the page. Then I take that space and set the height of the object that I have before the footer to that. This causes the footer to be "bumped" down to the end after the relayout() method gets called. And now the footer is in the proper place.
