Linking Question

[TEM3]

Using Crystal Reports 8.5:

I have minimal access to the Oracle tables I use to create reports. I can, of course, read them. I can also edit any field that is not an indexed/key field. However I cannot change the table structure or even add a new table (which is probably just-as-well).

The employee table is keyed on the User ID. It does not contain a field for supervisor. There was, however, an unused character field that I populated with the User ID of each employee's supervisor. However, the orginal "key" User ID field is 6 characters. This particular field is 20 characters.

I would love to be able to load and link a second instance of the employee table to my Crystal Report linking the "supervisor" field to the User ID field so that I could have access to the actual name of the person when referencing the supervisor. But, since the two fields are different lengths I get a warning when I try to link and it does not work.

Are there any tricks I could use to link the two fields??

 

[synapsevampire]

If they won't link, and you can't create a View to CAST or CONVERT the field to an appropriate type, then you might use a subreport and create a formula using left({table.bigfield},6) to use as the link.

Another alternative would be to modify the join in the Database->Show SQL Query, but his is ill-advised.

-k