Problem selecting records from multiple tables

Question

Good day
I am writing  a report showing actual vs budget amount per period.  The actual amounts are in one table and the budget amount are in another table.  In this example it is for vehicle sales.  The problem is that in the budget table, there are no records for a particular make if it was not budgeted to make a sale.  If I try to get the records using the select expert it matches the key in actual table with key in budget table and retrieve.  What happens then is that the records in the actual table get excluded if there was not a record for it in the budget table.  How do I then do this selection, i.e. if there is a record in the budget table, then retrieve, otherwise make the budget amount 0?
Thanks
Wilhelm

Answer 1

This is always difficult the best way is to use a command and union the two sets of data.
First part uses a left outer join from Actual to Budget and brings back all actual data with and without a budget.
Second parts brings back data from budegt where nothing exists in actual
select (field list) from
Actual a
left outer join Budget b on a.field = b.field
where (any other filter condition)
union all
select (field list) from
budget b
left outer join actual a on b.field = a.field and a.field is null
where (any other filter condition)
You can get the first query from your current report and the modify to build the second unioned query.
Ian