Suppressing information on Crystal Reports

Question

Hey all

I have the following fields in my report (I am running a report on meetings that occur at my company):

Meeting start , meeting end , General/meeting title, general/host, booked by and finally a custom formula field that shows only IT requirements.

Right now if i run the report, it shows me every single meeting that the company has and shows when there are IT requirements--not every meeting has an IT requirement.

Therefore i was wondering how to suppress showing a meeting if there are NO it requirements and it is blank? I don't need to see every meeting, just meetings with IT requirements.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This should probably be done in the query that drives the report so the report is not chewing through a lot of records that never get displayed, but you could always suppress the section the meeting details are in based on the custom formula field. Just put a conditional like 'myFormulaField == ""' on "suppress this section".

Answer 2

Depending on how the formula is constructed, you'll probably be able to use it in your record selection formula to exclude whatever you return in the field when there are no IT requirements, eg

{MyCustomFormula} <> ''

It is preferable to use the fields it's based on in the RSF, though, so that more work can be done on the server.

Answer 3

There are a bunch of ways to achieve this. Without more specific information, I can only offer generalities.

I believe the most efficient way to do so would be to use a Where clause (if you're using SQL) to your query and filter only for IT requirements.

A second and easier way, but with more processing time for the server, would be to use the select expert under Report - Select expert. Create a new filter and filter out all the records without IT requirements. You could also do this in the selection formula under Report - Selection Formulas - Record.

Theoretically you could supress records in their formatting per record, but that would be a hassle.

I'm sure there are other ways as well.

Does that help?