Crystal Reports: Dynamic Number of Groups

Can a viewer select the number of groups in the report? Yes.

This requires conditional section suppress on the Group Header, Details and Group Footer sections.

1) Create a parameter {?Group} 
2) Set conditional section suppress GH, D and GF using 
GroupNumber > {?Group} 

This works only if the group and TopN are the first group in your report. A lower level group will require a variable and the three formula technique to create a groupnumber for the lower level group.

You can also use dynamic crosstabs in a group.

A crosstab is a really useful report object. It can summarize a large volume of data into a grid of columns and rows. Each new version of CR introduces some great new formatting features of Crosstabs, so now we have multiple rows and columns, Customized Group Names, Styles, various summary functions, and a wide range of custom formatting.

The crosstab must have a field to specify the column and row. Tony Burns wanted a crosstab where the user could select the fields to use for the columns and the rows. This can be done with the user entering a value via a parameter.

The create a formula to use the parameter to select what field to use for the column:

if {?Col1}="Customer" then {Customer.Customer Name} else

if {?Col1}="Employee" then {Employee.First Name} + " " + {Employee.Last Name} else

if {?Col1}="Region" then {Customer.Region} else

if {?Col1}="Country" then {Customer.Country} else

if {?Col1}="Product" then {Product.Product Name} else

if {?Col1}="Product Class" then {Product.Product Class} else

if {?Col1}="Product Type" then {Product_Type.Product Type Name} else "Undefined"

You could have a similar formula for the Row and even the summarized field. The structure of the crosstab report is fixed with one row field, and one column field. You could easily create other report variations with two rows and/or two columns.

Make parameter values dynamic

If you have Crystal Reports XI or higher, you can make parameter values dynamic by selecting a Dynamic list of values, a different set of options is available. You can select a field to populate the list of values at run time. This is a feature users have been asking for many versions now.

But there is more. The list of values can come from a table or view used inside the report or a SQL command you control more directly.

If the report is managed inside Business Objects Enterprise, you must use a Business View to populate the list. Using BO Enterprise management the list can be scheduled and each series of cascading values can be scheduled at different intervals. So a field that doesn’t change frequently can be populated at a less frequent rate. And something that is very dynamic can be populated at run time.

The BO Enterprise environment also enables the sharing of the list among multiple users. The cache server retains the list for a short period so other users can make use of the same query against the database.

A final comment is that the parameter input form has been standardized to look the same to Crystal Reports and BO Enterprise users. The Windows calendar control has been replaced with an html style sheet and dates must now be entered in the format yyyy-mm-dd. risk report object.

It can summarize a large volume of data into a grid of columns and rows. Each new version of CR introduces some great new formatting features of Crosstabs, so now we have multiple rows and columns, Customized Group Names, Styles, various summary functions, and a wide range of custom formatting.

The crosstab must have a field to specify the column and row. Tony Burns wanted a crosstab where the user could select the fields to use for the columns and the rows. This can be done with the user entering a value via a parameter.

The create a formula to use the parameter to select what field to use for the column:

if {?Col1}="Customer" then {Customer.Customer Name} else

if {?Col1}="Employee" then {Employee.First Name} + " " + {Employee.Last Name} else

if {?Col1}="Region" then {Customer.Region} else

if {?Col1}="Country" then {Customer.Country} else

if {?Col1}="Product" then {Product.Product Name} else

if {?Col1}="Product Class" then {Product.Product Class} else

if {?Col1}="Product Type" then {Product_Type.Product Type Name} else "Undefined"

You could have a similar formula for the Row and even the summarized field. The structure of the crosstab report is fixed with one row field, and one column field. You could easily create other report variations with two rows and/or two columns.

Version 9.0 crosstabs

We have been great fans of crosstabs for many versions of Crystal Reports and are impressed with the improvements in version 9.0. You can include percentage summary fields, as of this version. The percentages can be based on the row or column totals at any level. You can include a label for any summarized field, and you can edit that and use any text you wish. . 

When a crosstab has multiple summary fields, earlier versions of Crystal Reports displayed the numbers vertically, one above the other. With Crystal Reports 9.0 you can now display these side by side. 

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