Crystal Reports: Interrogate Data During Crosstab Processing

Use a variables to interrogate data during the processing of the crosstab.

Ken Hamady found an interesting way to calculate additional totals while processing a crosstab. Ken describes in his newsletter how to use the conditional formatting functions of cells to reset and load variables inside a crosstab. Ken describes in detail how to use the cell formatting with variables. Check out his newsletter at  http://www.kenhamady.com

Luqman from Pakistan takes technique a step further to calculate ratios of summaries inside a crosstab. His crosstab has three summary fields, a Quantity total, a Sales total, and the third displays the average selling price.

Luqman uses the Display String conditional formatting to store the Sales total in a formula with 
GLOBAL NUMBERVAR MYVALUE;
MYVALUE:=TONUMBER(CURRENTFIELDVALUE);
TOTEXT(MYVALUE,2)

All this formula does is store the CurrentFieldValue in a global variable MyValue, and then display the summary. The ToText function is needed because the Display String property has to be a string value.

Then in the third summary is the Quantity summary again, but he uses the previously saved variable to calculate the ratio of the Sales/Quantity with 
GLOBAL NUMBERVAR MYVALUE;
IF MYVALUE>0 AND CURRENTFIELDVALUE>0 THEN
totext(MYVALUE/currentfieldvalue)

These two techniques display the real power of the crosstab objects. 

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