Dynamic Regions is an extended functionality of Regions and allows organizing data (patterns) in the output file more flexible. One or more dynamic regions can be added to the existing region at a time with a possibility to organize data within this region according to the specified properties.

Exercise

Download and import the attached configuration called 32. Dynamic Regions in Lasernet Developer 9. Afterwards, go to the Forms section and open the Sample form.

1. On the Developer toolbar, click the Dynamic Region tool. When the pointer becomes a cross, click the <salesUniTtxt> node in the input.

2. Right-click the dynamic region object you have just added, and then click Dynamic in the context menu that appears to set its properties. Otherwise, you can just double-click the object, and then switch to the Dynamic tab.

3. On the Dynamic tab of the Edit Dynamic Region dialog, select Ascending from the Sorting order drop-down box to arrange all available pattern instances in the ascending order within the current region. Keep the Multiple check box selected to handle the available group of pattern instances as standalone, so all available pattern instances can be arranged according to the specified ascending sorting order. Once you are done, click Ok.

As a result, in the output, you can see that items belonging to the region are sorted by the sales unit text in the ascending order. In addition, they are grouped by the field into so-called subregions (a result of the Multiple setting).

4. Afterwards, add a dynamic region to the <ItemId> node as well as specify the dynamic properties by setting the ascending sorting order and clearing the Multiple check box.

Thus, you can see how data is now arranged in the table of the output: the ascending order is applied to sort items belonging to the region by the item ID, and there is no division of the items into subregions (the Multiple setting is not applied).

You have added two dynamic region objects to the region at a time. As a property of the region, you can arrange dynamic region objects by moving each up or down. The top object is applied first. The object which follows in the list is applied to the sorted data as the next one. The objects are applied one by one from top to bottom.