Grouping and sorting inside group

Hi there!

As moving over from other report engines I use BIRT now inside a bigger project.

Currently I'm having difficulties (maybe it is just a basic understanding problem) in ordering inside groups from the design / report level.

Even though for production I use a scripted data source, I tried everything with the sampledb. Now to the problem:

I am grouping my customerlist lets say by country. Now I want to order the rows in this group by lastname of the customer. First option is to have that already by result set. Therefore it will work.
But I wanted to be a bit more flexible and tried to use the "Filters and Sorting" options in the Report Designer. Whatever I enter at the "Sorting" tab leads to a totally mixed and screwed up report order. Even if I start with the "country" column as a first criteria for Sorting.

As I could not figure out - nor with the BIRT help, nor the books - what kind of sorting is mentioned with this tabs in the Edit Group Properties?!??!?

And: Is it possible at all to reorder inside a group?

Regards

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Comments

mwilliams

Hi ikuser,

What version of BIRT are you using?

ikuser

I am using version 2.3.2 of everything related to BIRT.

mwilliams

ikuser,

For the example of grouping by country and sorting by customerlastname, you should just have to select the table and go to the sorting tab of the property editor and sort ascending by last name. The countries should stay in ascending order as selected by default in the group editor and the sorting within each group should be sorted ascending by last name.

Hope this helps.

ikuser

Hi Michael!

Thanks for that hint! I was really confused a bit as in JasperReports as far as I remember (my last BI stuff is approx. 2 yrs ago) you could make this "inside the group order" on group level. With the definition on table level it works fine! Thanks.

But still I have the question: For what purpose is the Sorting on the Group Properties? What kind of data is sorted there and how?

Greets,

ikuser

mwilliams

ikuser,

The sorting section in the group editor is for if you want to sort the groups by something other than the value you're grouping on. If you just put sort by customerlastname, you'd see that the last customerlastnames for each group would be in order.