Grouping by Formula. A Report Design Tip.
It is helpful to remember that Crystal Reports will allow you to group by just about any formula. This allows you to create groups that are not immediately available as fields in your database tables.
For example say your
boss is annoyed that your
report is only displaying
data by some obscure
in house sku number. Getting the
product description from a different
table is often possible by adding the table and linking, but in some cases that data is not readily available to you.
You could instead, create a formula that parses the skus for you.
if {itemkey}="0343243" then "Widget"
else if {itemkey="0343244"} then "Coffee Can, Black"
else "Misc. Item"
The values would then show up as nice tidy groups (the groups would show up as Widget, Coffee Can, and Misc Item Naturally if you have thousands of codes you will have to find other ways).
Also note that you don't necessarily have to test for just one
field! In the above
example for instance, you could add another
else if that checked for total
sales above certain amounts, and make a handy new
category. (Say your
widget sold more than $1,000,000, you could have the formula return
Hot Item - Widget - Sales Great than One Million or whatever would be useful.
Keeping in mind when creating a report that grouping by formula is an option, you can often provide far more flexible reports than simply using database fields!