AX Report formatting/section question

I’m fairly new to AX 2009 and am writing a BOM report. It displays data from 1 row in a header table-ProdTable and several rows in a detail table-ProdBOM - pretty simple so far. The only thing complicated, at least to me, about it is that on the right side of the page I need to print some ‘constant’ text and draw some boxes that will stretch from the top of the page to the bottom. This constant data doesn’t change. The report is designed to be printed out and the boxes on the right side are to be written on. I can’t figure out how to print this constant text and graphic data on the right side. Each section is ‘stacked’ when viewing in the report editor and I can’t seem to add a section that is hardcoded to stay at a fixed position on the right side of the page that goes from top to bottom. Is there a way of ‘watermarking’ the report with constant data? Can this be achieved by somehow using the ‘programmablesection’? Any help would be much appreciated, thank you.

To solve this kind of issues, I’ve interfaced the AX report with excel via COM, using a template.

Not so simple, but it can be done. If interested, take a look to the class DocuActionExcel where there are a lots of methods to interface with excel (or similar, I don’t remember exactly).

Another way, if you don’t want to mess with excel COM, is to use a single report layout that reflects exactly the page and fill the fields manually. Even this way isn’t so simple, so I prefer the first one.

PS: The ‘programmablesections’ are report section that you have to call manually from report methods. Not useful in your case, because thay act like all other sections.

Thank you for your reply. The only other suggestion I got was to use pre-printed forms which is something you really want to stay away from. I found that if I simply define 1 report section that basically covers the entire page and use the ‘addTextControl’ method and any other ‘add’ methods I need, I can do this or pretty much anything I want to do. Of course it has to be done with code but that’s fine.