Best Practice for Sub Report or Shared Variable 1

[dadazs]

Hello Tek-Tips'ers

I am working on three tables that contain employee information.

I have joined table1 (demographics, all employees table) to table2(where employees are working) via outer left join because I want a full list of employees and site if any.

Also, I need to join table3 (training record table) with outer left join to find out who was not trained yet.

Report works find with inner joins; however, if I add table3 with outer join then it is not working properly.

is it normal?

I have two solutions for that:

1st - create a sub report with training table and join via ID parameter.
2nd - Create a shared variable. The problem: shared variable disappears if I hide or suppress Group Header1.
If i keep it inhidden, shared report takes a lot of space and displays info that is not required.

I must be missing somthing. How can I use shared variable and have my report well presented.

Please advise

 

[lbass]

If you are using version 9.0 or greater (you should always specify your version), you can suppress all sections WITHIN the subreport, format the subreport itself to "suppress blank subreport" (format subreport->subreport tab), and then in the section expert of the main report, check "suppress blank section" for the section containing the subreport. This will make the section disappear. What you CANNOT do, is suppress or hide the section directly or suppress the subreport object.

The sub must be in a sectiot above the one referencing the shared variable.

-LB