Show most recent five records

[Davest11]

I have what I think is a fairly simple question, but I can't figure a way to do it. I'm using Crystal v10 SP4 on a Progress database. What I need is to show only the most recent five records, by date. The significant fields in the table are <CntctDate>, <CntctText>, and <CntctNum> (a unique identifier). There may be multiple records on a given date, so I don't see a way to group and using the Top N. Grouping and taking the Top N by the <CntctNum> won't work either, as the highest <CntctNum> won't always have the most recent <CntctDate>.

I considered creating a variable, incrementing it, and suppressing when the variable reaches 5, but this is a long report with many subreports, and I'm hoping that there's a more efficient way. I suspect that there's an automated way to simply display a particular number of records without grouping, but I can't find it.

Thanks,

-Dave

 

[jcl5]

Can't you simply sort by date and then create a running total counting each record and then supressing the section where RunningTotalField>5

jcl5

 

[Davest11]

Yes, that's probably what I'll end up doing. I was just hoping that there was a way to do it without bringing all the records down from the server and then suppressing them. This is one of about 15 sub-reports in this report, and it takes quite a while to run. Where I only need to see five out of several thousand records, a way to select only the five I want at the server level would save valuable seconds at runtime.

-Dave