I am stumped on this report

[nugget3825]

Good evening...

I AM STUMPED !

I normally only post the ones I cannot correct, which is not many but...

I have a client, with a membership application. They have asked for a report which selects members, from a county, calculates YEARS of membership, sorts the selected data (which in the current example is approx 77 members in DESCENDING sequence, and prints a report. I have designed hundres of exactly this kind of report but in this case, I'm missing something.

I'm attaching the report in design mode with the ORDER button set to DESCENDING. I am also attaching sample data with the YEARS column. And finally, a sample report.

So why does the report print in ASCENDING sequence, and I apparently, cannot change the sequence ?

If anyone has any ideas, I AM ALL EARS !

Lar

[madtowng]

I suspect it's in the query.
It would help greatly if you supplied the project if you're using dbfs or the sql query/structure if you're using sql.
The sample data should be used with either option.
If you've avoided using sql because the reports are based on dbfs, are you aware that alpha lets us import sql results
directly into dbf tables ?

[Ronald Anusiewicz]

You are ordering on a field called ‘years’. You do not state if this is a date, character or numeric field.
If it’s a date field, I would order using the following: cdate(years)

Another option would be to order on the date joined filed: cdate(datejoined)

You can check out cdate() here: https://documentation.alphasoftware....ATE%20Function

From the help file:

Assume you want to order an employee table by department and within each department by seniority. The table has a character field, DEPT, and a date field, STARTDATE.
Use the following order expression:

DEPT + cdate(START)

[nugget3825]

Ron, the "Years" field is N 5.0 I thought that was in the field specs. Either way, WHY does the INVERT the years field not work ? And, WHY does it not sequence the YEARS field as I requested ?

The years field should now be being treated as a pure NUMERIC and NOT a date.

Lar

[Ronald Anusiewicz]

Lar, the first thing I did was put together a test table with years,n,5,0 and fname,c,15.
I then made a report against that table and sorted by years descending. Works perfectly.

The obvious is that your report has something somewhere which is overriding your order expression.
Maybe there is a corruption or you have custom code on an event or something.

image.png


image.pngimage.png

Look at your structure information.

image.png

[Ted Giles]

As Ron suggests, look at the Report Settings, particularly those selecting records.

[Al Buchholz]

Your report groups by years.

That puts a sort in ascending order as primary and when you add the sort in the Select Records to Print dialog, that sorts the records at a level below the group. So in this case does nothing.

Check the properties of the group 'Years' and Change the Group Order to 'Use set ordering' to change the way order is defined. It makes for some wild ordering if you sort by name and keep this group...

Gets kinda fancy...
GroupByYears.png
GroupUseSetOrder.jpg