Placeholder columns

Hello,

is it possible to define placeholder columns which are filled with values at runtime of the report?
For example values must be calculated only once at report start depending on given parameters.

Thnks in advance

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mwilliams

Hi Berlino,

Can you please explain this a little more in detail? Thanks!

Berlino

Hi Michael,

we are yet using Oracle Reports and maybe we can migrate to BIRT.
Therefore we must be sure that the functions existing in Oracle also exist in BIRT.
Placeholder columns, for what they are good for?
Example:
report on sales per product group
columns:
product group / salesman A / salesman B / salesman C .....
At runtime of the report it is necessary to display in the column heading the salesman's name. But the names differ depending on department/company...
Starting the report the values of the column heading are read once from database and filled in the placeholder columns.
Hope I could explain in a better way...

Thanks!

mwilliams

Berlino,

This sounds like a crosstab. You would define dimensions, for example, date and salesman. Then you'd have a measure, for example, sales. For the date you could choose a grouping of quarter, for the salesperson dimension, the names of all salesmen in the dataSet would be used as a dimension. So, you'd see the quarterly sales for each salesman in your returned dataSet, no need to define column names. Is this a scenario that you're talking about?

Berlino

Michael,

not exactly.
Because in this case the layout should be limited on one page. Making a crosstab report you possibly receive more columns than fit on one page.

I'll try another example:
- detail rows with amounts of money for every order item
- at higher grouping level this amount is summed up and it is necessary to compute the tax for this amount and the gross as sum of amount and tax.
Totals row:
- Col A (amount, value from data base)
- Col B (formula column, makes computation and assigns the values to C and D at runtime only for each totals row)
- Col C (pl aceholder, for tax value calcualted from Col

- Col D (placeholder, for gross value calcualted from Col

.
The question is, can I define in BIRT columns like C and D?

Thanks!

roadblock2

these just sound like computed columns to me

Hans_vd

Berlino,

You can select a Data component from the palette, place it in the column heading and build an expression that does the calculation.

In the expression builder you can use dataset columns, aggregations and every other item that is on your report and do some calculations on it.

Hope this helps

Berlino

Hello,

can I do the following:
define columns (A, B, C, ...) in the manner described above.
And then doing some calculations (values X, Y, Z) in Col A and then assign
X to Col B, Y to Col C and so on.

Thanks!