Report Design Issue 080114

[gregoriw]

Hello to all my Tek_Tips friends,

First off, before you ask...I'm using Crystal Reports 11 and SQL Server

I need a little guidance in how to design an addendum to my main summary report. If you can, please post suggestions. Basis of my design issue is that for every summary row there is data for each account tied to another table that tracks "comments" for each account. Sometimes an account can have 20, 50, 100 comments tied to it.

My boss wants to add three specific columns to the right-most edge of this "grid-like" report. But instead of showing all comments for this one account, he wants to show only one row of data from this comments table. That row must be the most recent/last comment entered.

So the situation is such that I ask - which is the best way to display this data? Use a subreport? Try to link the tables to the other tables? Seems that I'd need to use a simple formula to get that data.

The other "gotcha" to consider is that my boss wants the report to generate the report but he immediately exports the report to Excel-Data Only option. I've read that sometimes data doesn't export cleanly from the subreport in this situation. Is there anything I need to look out for if I use the sub-report option?

Thanks,
Wolfgang

 

[hilfy]

Assuming that you're just linking tables together in your report, I'm not sure that there's going to be any way to do this effectively with the way your report is currently written. Like you said, subreports don't always export cleanly to Excel. You said this is a "summary" report, so I assume that you're adding numbers together here. If you add the comments table to the report and link to it, you're going to have issues with your numbers being multiplied by however many comments there are for a given row.

Having said that, how are your SQL skills? I can think of a way to get around the issue using a "Command" which is a SQL Select statement. There are a couple of tricks to working with Commands in Crystal, but the biggest thing is that you should have a single Command that brings back ALL of the data for your report - reports can be significantly slowed down if you combine a Command with tables or another Command because Crystal will have to join the data in memory.

-Dell

DecisionFirst Technologies - Seven-time SAP BusinessObjects Solution Partner of the Year

http://www.decisionfirst.com