Alerter on entire row

Hi team,

I have got a real challenge with an alerter in my report. My crosstab looks like this:

Horizontal:

Vertical:

Body:

The display level of each row determines how the entire row should be displayed (for example with different shading). Every month of the year is shown, even if no data is present for that particular month, and no fields are returned.

How can I make sure the alerter is applied on the empty fields as well? Now only the shadings are changed for the cells where a value is present…

Thanks in advance,

Suzanne.[list][/list]


stang (BOB member since 2004-07-19)

That’s a great question. The problem is the the empty “cells” aren’t really there. Since Alerts only apply to the cells…
You might have to make the Alert format apply to the whole block, and then “unAlert” the others based on the reverse condition.


Steve Krandel :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

Steve,

Thanks for the reply!

The solution you suggest might be a good solution, except for the fact that mostly all data for the specific month is not present. The company for which I’m developing this report would like to see all months of a year, whether the month has passed or not… Thus for all rows no data is present from a certain month on.

Do you know any other alternatives?

Suzanne.


stang (BOB member since 2004-07-19)

Your best solution is to ensure that the “empty” cells are populated with a value (such as 0). This will fill in the gaps and allow you to use the Alerters you want and will save you more headaches down the road.

You can do this with views, materialized views, union queries, dummy values or various other methods.


digpen :us: (BOB member since 2002-08-15)

Look at this thread to bring back all months even if there is no matching data row.


Andreas :de: (BOB member since 2002-06-20)

Thanks for all of your help… I’m afraid it still does not work. I think there are a number of causes, why it does not:

  1. My company has restricted me from the use of unions, concerning performance issues.
  2. The dimensions which are on the axes of the crosstab are dimensions which are determined on the reporter level. I guess this way I cannot link a dummy value to either of these?

Hmm… I guess it gets really hard now to make the alerter work? The problem is December is always retrieved from the database from an earlier year than the reporting year, to determine the difference with the previous month. This results in december to be highlighted and the other missing months of the reporting year to be empty… :roll_eyes:

Maybe I should retrieve for every month of the previous year at least one value. Then the alerter should work?


stang (BOB member since 2004-07-19)