Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress 4GL Reference

LINE-COUNTER function

Returns the current line number of paged output.

The initial value of LINE-COUNTER is 1. At the completion of each DISPLAY statement, Progress increments LINE-COUNTER by the number of lines that were output in that DISPLAY statement. LINE-COUNTER continues to increase until after at least one line has been printed on a new page.

LINE-COUNTER returns a 0 if the output is not paged.

Syntax

LINE-COUNTER [ ( stream ) ]

stream

Specifies the name of a stream. If you do not name a stream, Progress uses the unnamed stream. For more information on streams, see this book’s DEFINE STREAM statement reference entry and OpenEdge Development: Programming Interfaces .

Example

This procedure prints a customer report, categorized by state. At the end of each state category, it tests to see if there are at least four lines left on the page. The LINE-COUNTER function returns the current line number of output. If that number plus four is greater than the total number of lines on the page (returned by the PAGE-SIZE function), then the procedure starts the new page. If there are four or more lines left, the procedure skips a line before printing the next customer record.

r-linec.p

OUTPUT TO PRINTER. FOR EACH customer BREAK BY state: DISPLAY cust-num name address city state. IF LAST-OF(state) THEN DO: IF LINE-COUNTER + 4 > PAGE-SIZE THEN PAGE. ELSE DOWN 1. END. END.

Notes

When output is sent to a device other than the terminal screen, Progress defers displaying a frame until another frame is displayed. That way, if you display the same frame several times consecutively, Progress performs all those displays at once. Because of this optimization, if the last display fills the page, the value returned by the LINE-COUNTER function can be larger than the page size, even though the next frame is displayed at the start of the new page.
Use a procedure like this one to verify that output is positioned on the first non-header line of a new page:

DEFINE VARIABLE newpage AS LOGICAL INITIAL YES. DEFINE STREAM output1. FOR EACH customer: FORM HEADER "Page Header" PAGE-NUMBER(output1) "Line" LINE-COUNTER(output1) WITH FRAME one PAGE-TOP NO-LABELS NO-BOX. VIEW STREAM output1 FRAME one. DISPLAY STREAM output1 name PAGE-NUMBER(output1) LINE-NUMBER(output1) WITH NO-LABELS NO-BOX. IF new-page THEN DISPLAY STREAM output1 "First Line". IF LINE-COUNTER(output1) > PAGE-SIZE(output1) THEN newpage = YES. ELSE newpage = NO. END.

See also

DEFINE STREAM statement