Adding a new group in Crystal Reports causes all of my existing groups to disappear

Question

My problem in a nutshell: I create a new report, I insert a number of groups one at a time, and everything goes fine until I add the final group and suddenly I get zero results back for the entire report.

I'm new to Crystal Reports, so I'm not even sure I'm using the right vocabulary, and I'm sure this is one of the reasons I'm having such a hard time googling this. I have a book I'm going through (Pro VS 2005 Reporting Using SQL Server and Crystal Reports) but it's very specific about putting forth a set of steps to follow and it doesn't really explain the why of things.

I'm using VS 2005, C#, with built in Crystal Reports; I don't have a fancy stand alone version.

I am creating a DataSet and passing it into the report as the report Database. The DataSet has four tables: a user table (which includes a user Group ID), a course table with a list of courses that the user has taken, an exam details table with details about each exam in the course (including an exam score), and a topic details table, with information about exam topics (including a score for each topic on the exam).

I can add a user group group, a users group, a courses group, and an exam group, and return the details for each exam. But when I add a topic group everything disappears. If I add a topic group by itself I see a list of topics, but making the topic group an inner group of any other group only gives me a blank report.

I checked and I have relations defined between all my tables that should indicate which topic goes with which exam, etc.

Let me know if you need any additional information. I'm sure this is something simple that I'm overlooking because I don't have a dedicated Crystal Reports book.

Answer 1

Can you try and re-create the essential SQL that is being used, directly in the database? It sounds like you're getting data back until that last group is added, and that makes the query now return an empty set.

Answer 2

One of the remedies I found was removing underscore from sql fields, to keep the other tags from disappearing. I was initially having the field "abc_xyz" in sql, had to change it to "abcxyz" to make it work in crystal.