Layout Container

There are two types of Layout containers: Section Layouts and Table Layout cells.

A Section Layout can accept the following element types: TextBox, Static Text, Shape, Image, Table or Layout (Layouts can be nested). Elements in a layout are assigned to rows and columns with possible spanning like with a Table Layout cell. They differ in that they can also have coordinates. The coordinates are relative to the top left corner of their layout row/column (This is especially important for static text and shapes).

An element in a layout can optionally take its width and height from its parent layout (this is not supported for rotated text). Section Layouts always have a fixed height and may appear (be “placed”) on “All”, “Even”, “Odd”, “First” or “Last” pages.

Auto row heights are a little different from Table Layout cells. If you have an auto row in the Layout, it’s height will be either 0 if no element on the row is to be included on the page, or the full height of the Layout.

One thing this approach allows is an image on the first page of a section before the table. To do that, set the row with the image to Auto and the row with the table to 100%. The table will be sized and positioned based on whether or not the image appears on the page. In this case, the table needs to get it’s height from the layout.