Sort on Attribute form that is not displayed on the report

[MSIsam]

MSI 7.2.1
I have an attribute for Company that has the following forms:

ID      = CO_ID
DESC    = CO_DESC
CONC_ID = SORT_ID

I want a report that displays just the CO_DESC, but is sorted on the SORT_ID

[u]CO_DESC       Sales[/u]
ACCME West     100
ACCME South    200
ACCME East     300
ACCME North    150

The problem I see is that even though the attribute form, SORT_ID, is set up with the ascending sort property, the report SQL does not bring the field in to the report unless specified in the display. Is there a way to do this as a global setting (All reports with the attrubute), without using the advanced sorting function of the report?

I would appreciate any help and or advice on this.

 

[nlim]

The sorting you get when you define the attribute is how it gets displayed in the data explorer.

The sorting of a result set is dependent on each report, there is no way to set up a default that applies to EVERY report. This is the case because if there are 3 attributes with some sort order, the report won't know which is the right order to sort them in...

So the answer is you'll likely need to set the sort order for your specific report. Any reason why you don't want to use the advanced sorting? Maybe you have another issue that can be solved some other way?

 

[MSIsam]

Thanks nlim,
I did not want to use the advanced sorting because I am applying this new sort_id to over 300 reports. Just wanted to know if there was another way. I thought that since I only set the sorting on the SORT_ID form, that the application might pick that up and bring into the report. I guess I better get to work on those 300 reports!

 

[Z3]

Not sure if this is will work, but what you could do is, change your attribute to use the sort id (better be unique) as the ID, DESC as the desc. Then create a hidden attribute to only use the ID as ID (only one form), and has the current attribute as the only 1:1 parent. You will also need to move all the relationship to the hidden attributes. Hopefully you have simple relationship and this would work well for you.