thanks, but with all due respect, my post maybe a little too descriptive, but it says that that is exactly what the report has ie sets the PAGE_NUMBER text box to Now and the second one to group... this has worked flawlessly until we switched to jasper 3.6.1... that is the reason for my post as it doesn't work now, both show the same page number.. ie they show the value evaluated at Now or Page time. thanks anyone who can shed some light on this