>---------
>So, I don't see any benefit in the 'option' we have with _pagetotal.
>----------
>
>IMHO, _PAGETOTAL is a real non-event as an enhancement -- it just makes something explicit (and a bit harder to document for your team, as you're finding out <s>) that we always had (and had ways of documenting normally).
>
>But let's agree to say _PAGETOTAL *is* a good idea for the people who want to use it. You're not quite seeing the point of the "optional" two-pass.
>
>To say that raw performance was the only reason to make the two-pass optional is a drastic oversimplification.
>
>There are people who run UDFs during a report triggering other activity, and these people really would not have been happy if their reports had suddenly, and non-optionally, started triggering each UDF twice just to support _PAGETOTAL <g>.
>
>And then, of course, there are other people whose reports are *not* under 20 pages <g>. They would have been unhappy also.
>
>Let's not even get started with what would happen with Preview as you paged happily back and forth between pages!
>

>So, the people who implemented _PAGETOTAL did the best they could. They wanted to provide this enhancement for people who (for whatever reason) couldn't figure out how to do this without _PAGETOTAL, but they also (for good reason) had to do it in a way that would not disturb existing practices and that (for excellent reasons) could be intelligently omitted when a Preview was happening.
>
>>L<

I didn't say that all our reports are under 20 pages, as you seem to suggest, and we have UDFs too (one is page(), the "root" of my problem). I was talking about performance as a global indicator, i.e. 75% of the reports are of a size that makes a twice run unnoticeable, and for the rest of the reports the performance hit is insignificant reported to, say, printing time.
I agree that people who implemented _PAGETOTAL did the best they could, that doesn't mean it is the best possible - maybe if they implemented it the way I said and make the reports a bit slower, that would encourage designing fewer, smaller, and more efficient reports, and we could save our forests! :)
Thanks again.