Is There A Way To Sort Running Total Fields?

[ETCS]

I have a report that counts occurrences of trouble tickets. It uses two groups. The first being the product family and second the issue Category.

I have a sum field showing the total number of issues in each category. I have a group sort on the category summary field to display only the top 5 categories per product family. I am then using a running total field to show the total of those top 5 for each product family in Group Footer 1.

I would like to apply a sort to the running total field so they display largest to smallest but I can't figure out how to do it (or even if it's possible).

Can anyone assist?

Thanks!

PG

 

[chelseatech]

I had a similar problem at a client site yesterday. They wanted to sort the groups by one of the percent summaries in the lower level group. While the top N osrt wizard lets you sort groups on a summary, the summary has to be at that group level.

If you look at the evaluation time you will see sort and TopN happen before the running total field is calculated.

So officially what we both want to do is impossible. I always regard that as a challenge. How could I do this?

The solution I came up with was to use my Share function UFL to save the value I want to sort by in a "Share File". Then retrieve that when the records are being read, and use that as a sort field. The big catch is the report needs to be refreshed twice. Once to calculate the sort sequence and the second time to use that to sort the data. On the first run, the sort sequence is from the previous run of the report.

The Share UFL is a useful utility that can save data between different reports, or between runs of the same report.

There will be an article about this technique in the next issue of Crystal Clear due out in the next week or so.

Editor and Publisher of Crystal Clear

http://www.chelseatech.co.nz/pubs.htm

 

[ETCS]

Thank you for your response. I have never used a UFL. Do you know where I could get some additional information on the creation of a custom function?

Thanks again,

PG