Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

[Rich Hartnett]

I know this has got to be simple, but I've spend hours trying to make it work and I can't get a handle on it.

I have a report based on a set. Parent table is "Fire Department Incidents," and the Child table is "Apparatus" (vehicles).

I filter the report to a specific period of dates and a type of Incident. In the example, the incident is "Apartment Fire."

I want to show how many Apartment Fires (each incident has its own Incident Number) there were, but of course the child records cause the Incident Number to repeat for every child.

So I created a group break, which breaks at each Incident Number, and it works great. Without the group break it shows 15 entries, but with the group break it shows 8 individual Incidents. Perfect.

But now I want to show the total number of Incidents (or Incident Numbers), which should be 8, and I am stumped. I've tried dragging the Incident Number field out into the report footer, hoping it would count the number of times it appeared, but the calculation always returns "1."

I then created a simple expression that says Count1 = 1, and placed it in the group break header, so that each time the Incident Number appeared, the value of "1" would appear along side of it. I then tried putting that calculated field into the report footer, hoping it would count the 8 times it appears on the report, but it also returns a value of "1."

So how can I count the number of Incidents, which are actually group breaks?

[Ray in Capetown]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

Try select "total of records" for the child field added to the group header

[Rich Hartnett]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

Hi Ray

I'm not sure what you mean by "Total of Records" for the child field added to the group header. If you mean "count of records," I tried having it count the calculated field "Count1 = 1," hoping it would provide an answer of 8 records since the group header changes 8 times and that field (which is displayed along with the group header) displays a "1" every time, but that also returned a value of 1.

Can you elaborate on what you mean? Thanks

[Jay Talbott]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

Richard,
Did you try the calculated field like this:
total(calc->count1,grp->pgfdincno,grp->grand)

Jay

[Rich Hartnett]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

Hi Jay

No I hadn't tried that expression, but I just did.

Same result. :(

Surely there must be an easy way to count records in without the child records causing them to be repeated and counted over again?

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

http://www.alphasoftware.com/alphafo...current_filter

[Rich Hartnett]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

Thanks for the link Stan.

Jay actually had me alter his suggested expression from the above post a little bit, and now it works fine!

total(calc->count1,grp->grand,grp->pgfdincno)

Thanks as always to all of you.

[Ray in Capetown]

Re: Report Total based on Group Break (Keeping child records from being counted)

A bit late, I had to first set up a sample db, the suggestion I proposed would have resulted in this calc
count(pgfdincno->pgfdincno,grp->Grand,grp->pgfdincno)

Counts number of primary records pgfdincno