Custom sorting in ReportNet

[Bjarkio]

I forgot to wrap up the previous thread with the second question

2)
Do you know if there is a way to do custom sorting in ReportNet. That is if you have data (such as departments) and decisionmakers are really picky on the order they see it in. The order of course changes every week with changes in the business.

So I want to be able to sort a column with the data:
alfa, beta, gamma, sigma in the order:
gamma, sigma, beta, alfa . This is not ascending and not descending and the only info I have.

The only solutions I know of right now is making new columns with huge if-statements or having the work done at the database level. After using BO custom sorting i'm quite reluctant to get this feature out of the reporting environment though.

Any ideas on that one?

thanks in advance
Bjarki

 

[kchaves]

What I do is create a new data field, translating the word to an alpha letter in the order you want them sorted. Then sort this field behind the scenes in the query or tabular model.
IF([FIELD]='gamma') then ('a')
else if ([FIELD]='sigma') then ('b')
else if ([FIELD]='beta') then ('c')
else if ([FIELD]='alfa') then ('d')
else ([FIELD]

Then sort that data field in ascending order, but show the original field on the report.

This works if you only have a few Field Results that you have to identify. It could get to be a maintenance nightmare if you have several field results to deal with.