keep section head and detail together

[tbee]

I have a multicolumn report with one group header section. The header has "new col or row before and after" to make sure the header always starts on a new line.

Basically I have two problems:
1. the minor problem: the header section is as wide as the detail. This is survivable, but when a "before and after" is set, the section always has room to span the page. Is there a trick to achieve this?
If I would use "page before" then I could use the page header to display the group header, but that is not an option.

2. the real problem: the group header can be displayed at the bottom of one page and the actual detail on the next page. This is visually not attractive. I need a way to keep header-detail together (like paragraphs in Word) and only page break between detail-detail or detail-header.
Setting the header to "repeat on page break" works in that the header is repeated on the next page, but then the next detail is placed directly to the right of the header. And that is not the idea either.

[tbee]

FYI: I came up with a hack of myself: I moved the texts of the header to the details section and sized the header to 0 height and only use it to insert the "new cols before and after".

The header texts in the details are of minimal height with autogrow. Then I implemented the grouping using a module variable to detect grouping and another to determine index within a group. On idx = 1 the headers are filled from corresponding hidden fields, on idx=2 the headers are filled with a space to make sure they take equal room so it all lines up on the line, for idx>2 (next line) the texts are set to empty strings so they use as less room as possible.

This results in some restrictions to the layout but it does work acceptably. And it also allows me have some kind of a page wide header (a line).

[MMcCarthy]

I have a multicolumn report with one group header section. The header has "new col or row before and after" to make sure the header always starts on a new line.

Basically I have two problems:
1. the minor problem: the header section is as wide as the detail. This is survivable, but when a "before and after" is set, the section always has room to span the page. Is there a trick to achieve this?
If I would use "page before" then I could use the page header to display the group header, but that is not an option.

2. the real problem: the group header can be displayed at the bottom of one page and the actual detail on the next page. This is visually not attractive. I need a way to keep header-detail together (like paragraphs in Word) and only page break between detail-detail or detail-header.
Setting the header to "repeat on page break" works in that the header is repeated on the next page, but then the next detail is placed directly to the right of the header. And that is not the idea either.

Click on the grey bar defining the group header and open the properties window. Under the format tab set the Force New Page property to Before Section.