Showing Items with no transactions

Question

I am trying to build a report that will show us items with potentially incorrect item status.  Item status (on table itmmas) is either A(ctive) or I(nactive).  The report should show all Inactive items which have had at least one transaction in the past 4 weeks AND active items which have had no transactions in that period.
My plan is to join the item master table to the item ledger table (itmldg) which lists all inventory transactions.  I can show the inactive items with transactions without a problem.
What I can't figure out is how to show items with Active Status that don't have any transactions.  I can't get CR to return a data set which includes ALL records from itmmas but only those from itmldg in the last 4 weeks.  I tried this SQL query:
SELECT itmmas.itmiid, itmmas.itmdes, itmmas.itmsts, itmldg.ilgdno, itmldg.ilgdat
FROM {oj itmmas  LEFT OUTER JOIN itmldg ON itmmas.itmiid = itmldg.ilgiid}
WHERE (itmldg.ilgdat>={d '2009-09-01'})
When I run this query in MS Query and return the results to Excel, I get single lines for items with no transactions.  For these items, the fields from itmldg are NULL.  When I run this query in CR, I don't get any data for items with no transactions.
Can anyone think of a way to get this to work?

Answer 1

The issue that you have is that the WHERE clause in your SQL statement is only looking at an itmldg table field for a value.  This is effectively making your Left Outer Join an Inner Join, because when an itmmas record does not have an itmldg record, the date field will be NULL.  You have to add the condition "OR itmldg.ilgdat is null".
If you want to return ONLY the records that the report is interested in (which should have beter performance), change the SQL to
SELECT itmmas.itmiid, itmmas.itmdes, itmmas.itmsts, itmldg.ilgdno, itmldg.ilgdat
FROM {oj itmmas LEFT OUTER JOIN itmldg ON itmmas.itmiid = itmldg.ilgiid}
WHERE ((itmldg.ilgdat>={d '2009-09-01'}) and (itmmas.itmsts = 'I'))
  or  ((itmldg.ilgdat is null) and (itmmas.itmsts = 'A'))
HTH,
Carl