Report behaving badly ... Can anyone help?

Question

Post Author: OzyatHome
CA Forum: Crystal Reports
I am relatively new to Crystal Reporting, but have been using it more and more over the past 3-4 months. I have just encountered a problem that I simply cannot resolve - any help would be greatly appreciated ... I have basically written a report with 3 groups; Year, Activity, Program where all group headings and footers are hidden apart from the group footer for group 3 - Program. It worked well reporting all Programs in the database for the selected Years and Activity types. The database structure behind this report was straight forward as  all details being reported at Program level came from just 2 tables (Activity and Program). An Activity table entry holding the Year for each activity and a link to the 1 or more Programs that make up each activity. The reported consists of one line per Program, all details reported being sourced from either the Program table entry or its Activity parent table entry. I was then asked to also report the Tutor Name for each Program. All Tutor Names being held on a Staff table linked to each program by the Tutors Reference "once allocated", BUT until Tutors are allocated to a Program there is no Tutor Reference on the Program table to link from the Program table entry to the Staff table. I therefore added a 4th group, that being Tutor Names for which I suppressed everything, simply adding a new summary to my single detail line at Program level, namely a distinct count of Tutor Names which I then intended to check to see if  a Tutor existed or not before setting a formula field to the  Staff table's Tutor Name for reporting. I didn't however get that far as the results after simply adding the new summary count were not as I expected. Whereas before the change all programs to which no Tutors had yet to be assigned were being reported OK, post the above change only Programs reporting a distinct count of Tutor Names greater than zero were reported! I cannot see why this should be? Any pointers or help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks .. Kev                       

Answer 1

Post Author: OzyatHome
CA Forum: Crystal Reports
There are several tables involved, but to simplify the issue I have only mentioned the 3 that are relevant to this problem. There is no common link between the tables. I defined the links between the 3 in question as follows:- Activity links to Program on 2 common key fields and Program links to Staff on 2 different common keys. I defined the links manually after adding the tables to the report.  The tables part of an off the shelf system that runs under Windows 2000, They are relational tables, but a re not Access tables, so I have to link to them via the ODBC layer. The relationship between the tables are as follows:- Activity will always link to one or more Program. Programs will only link to a Staff table entry (where Tutor Name is held) when a Tutor has been allocated to the Program and the Tutor Reference field on the Program table has been populated. Once populated the Tutor Reference will always have a matching entry on the Staff table. The summary of Tutor Names that I set up as a distinct count looks to be being reset automatically (how do you manually reset such counts on change of group?), but programs that were being reported before I added the 4th group that have no Tutor allocated to them are no longer being reported. I expected them to be reported still with a distinct count of Tutor Names being zero. Does that clarify the issue? Many thanks for your help.  Kevin