Is it possible to BREAK ON a column in addition to the one specified in SQL*Plus?

Question

This one's tough to explain, so I'll try to show what I'm after using examples. Please note that I'm not asking if it's possible to use multiple columns in a BREAK statement--I know that it is.

Suppose I have a query like the following:

SELECT  invoice_no, invoice_date, vendor, account, amount
FROM    invoice
ORDER   BY vendor, invoice_no, account

And suppose the result set from that is:

INVOICE_NO INVOICE_DATE VENDOR  ACCOUNT AMOUNT
---------- ------------ ------- ------- ------
0001       30-JAN-2009  Alpha   1000     50.00
0003       30-JAN-2009  Alpha   1000    125.00
0003       30-JAN-2009  Alpha   3000     33.33
0006       02-FEB-2009  Alpha   2000     40.00
0005       31-JAN-2009  Bravo   1000     40.00
0002       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 2000    120.75
0002       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 3000      5.00
0004       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 1000    900.50

So you can see that some vendors have multiple invoices, and some invoices have multiple accounts.

To hide the duplicate vendor names and invoice numbers, I can use SQL*Plus's BREAK command like so:

BREAK ON vendor ON invoice_no

Which produces this result set:

INVOICE_NO INVOICE_DATE VENDOR  ACCOUNT AMOUNT
---------- ------------ ------- ------- ------
0001       30-JAN-2009  Alpha   1000     50.00
0003       30-JAN-2009          1000    125.00
           30-JAN-2009          3000     33.33
0006       02-FEB-2009          2000     40.00
0005       31-JAN-2009  Bravo   1000     40.00
0002       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 2000    120.75
           30-JAN-2009          3000      5.00
0004       30-JAN-2009          1000    900.50

So far, so good. I would also like to hide duplicate invoice dates, so that just the first date for each invoice is shown. However, if I use this command:

BREAK ON vendor ON invoice_no ON invoice_date

It will go too far and hide the date for invoices 0003 and 0004, just because they are the same as the previous invoices from their respective vendors:

INVOICE_NO INVOICE_DATE VENDOR  ACCOUNT AMOUNT
---------- ------------ ------- ------- ------
0001       30-JAN-2009  Alpha   1000     50.00
0003                            1000    125.00
                                3000     33.33
0006       02-FEB-2009          2000     40.00
0005       31-JAN-2009  Bravo   1000     40.00
0002       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 2000    120.75
                                3000      5.00
0004                    Charlie 1000    900.50

What I'd really like is a command syntax like the following (I made up the term AND):

BREAK ON vendor ON invoice_no AND invoice_date

The intention is that, whenever it breaks on invoice_no, to also break on invoice_date (since I know that a single invoice number can't have two invoice dates):

INVOICE_NO INVOICE_DATE VENDOR  ACCOUNT AMOUNT
---------- ------------ ------- ------- ------
0001       30-JAN-2009  Alpha   1000     50.00
0003       30-JAN-2009          1000    125.00
                                3000     33.33
0006       02-FEB-2009          2000     40.00
0005       31-JAN-2009  Bravo   1000     40.00
0002       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 2000    120.75
                                3000      5.00
0004       30-JAN-2009  Charlie 1000    900.50

And now the dates are correctly displayed for invoices 0003 and 0004.

Is there any way to accomplish this in SQL*Plus?

Answer 1

You can BREAK ON an expression, so by turning the fields of interest into strings and concatenating them with || you should be able to put together an expression that lets you break on "both of their values".

Answer 2

It doesn't seem like SQL*Plus can do the trick. I ended up using sed to get rid of the invoice dates whenever the invoice number was blank:

sed -re 's/^( {11})[0-9A-Z-]{11}(.+)$/\1           \2/'