Page Break vs Page Protect

Page Break Before:

The Page Break Before property indicates that you want the object to be formatted on the page after the page on which it is initially triggered to print.  Note that this does not necessarily mean that all the objects below the object with Page Break Before will move to the next page.

Suppose that you want each instance of a repeating frame to be on a logical page by itself.  First, set Maximum Records Per Page to 1 for the repeating frame so that only one instance appears on each logical page.  Then, specify Page Break Before and Page Break After, to make sure that the first instance of the repeating frame starts on a new logical page.

Page Break After

The Page Break After property indicates that you want all children of the object to be moved to the next page.  In other words, any object that is a child object of an anchor (implicit or explicit) to this object will be treated as if it has Page Break Before set to Yes.  Note that this does not necessarily mean that all the objects below the object with Page Break After will move to the next page.

Suppose that you want each instance of a repeating frame to be on a logical page by itself.  First, set Maximum Records Per Page to 1 for the repeating frame so that only one instance appears on each logical page.  Then, specify Page Break Before and Page Break After, to make sure that the first instance of the repeating frame starts on a new logical page.

Page Protect:

The Page Protect property indicates whether to try to keep the entire object and its contents on the same logical page.  Setting Page Protect to Yes means that if the contents of the object cannot fit on the current logical page, the object and all of its contents will be moved to the next logical page.

Suppose that you have a group report.  If at all possible, you would like to have all of the details and the master appearing on the same page.  To do this, you specify Page Protect for the master repeating frame (the outermost repeating frame).  If the details and the master cannot fit on the first page on which they are triggered to print, they will be triggered to print on the next page instead.