Zero to Many Relationships w/o Sub Reports???

[ericbutter]

Crystal XI R2
Oracle

I have a complex report that is currently built using 6 sub reports all of which have a 0 to many relationship with the parent report. The report is too slow to use.

I've been experimenting with trying to eliminate the subreports and use grouping, suppressing, etc. to get everything on to the parent report.

Parent Record
Sub Records 1 0 to many with Parent
Sub Records 2 0 to many with Parent
Sub Records 3 0 to many with Parent
etc.

The results are very unpredictable. It appears that all of the sub record sections react to each other sometimes causing duplications, sometimes suppressing another result, etc. I can't understand a pattern. My suppressions and formulas are not cutting it.

Has anyone successfully built anything like this? How?

Thanks! ebutter

 

[lbass]

Yes. And complex reports would be hard to troubleshoot here. If records might or might not exist in some of these tables then you need to use left outer joins to bring them into the report, with no selection criteria on those tables to the right of the left outer join. Grouping will help with duplicates, as will record sorting, but then you may need to do some conditional suppression, too.

The first step would be to lay out the desired fields in the detail section and then to note how they repeat in order to decide the best grouping approach. You might decide that a combination of one or two subreports, along with grouping, is the best approach.

-LB