Printing months in order of month, not alphabetical

building reports webintelligence
1

I’m a bit new to webi and I was hoping I might get some guidance from someone. First, I am hoping some one can recommend a book that is good at how to generate reports. I don’t need the administrator side of it, just the user side of things. Second, If you could get me started on getting my dates to print correctly, I would appreciate the help. I am trying to chart some data by month, and it prints it out starting with “April”. I created a column that prints out the number of the month and now it all prints in order, but now it prints out with 1,2,3,4,5, etc. across the x axis. How do I change the numbers back into their corresponding Text names? (January, Febraury, etc)

thanks.

tbrown7777 (BOB member since 2007-05-23)

2

I can’t help with any book.

Regarding the dates… you may try with a custom sort.

Or maybe making the name an information associated with the number.

infacc00 :es: (BOB member since 2007-05-14)

3

Ask your universe designer to create a Month object as data type DATE, formatted as Mmm. This way it will sort chronologically.

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

4

If you are on a financial calendar your dates may not always fall in the fiscal month you think. Another approach using an alerter is described in This thread.

Basically you build your table using the month number and the use an alterter with a MonthNum = MonthNum to substitute the month name.

chris_c :us: (BOB member since 2006-01-10)

5

I agree with the eirlier post about the custom sort. I was experiencing a similar issue for a weekly report that I needed to display the days of the week. The custom sort functionality was a big help there.

Markus

Markus Lowry :us: (BOB member since 2007-03-30)

6

Custom sort works very well.
Unfortunately the “Hard Coded” nature of the custom sort made my PM cringe :shock:

I think custom sort is great on items that don’t change, but if the dimension is somewhat dynamic then you may find yourself having to identify every report using a custom sort and modifying. The Alerter option requires no report updates to change the sort or add items. 8)

chris_c :us: (BOB member since 2006-01-10)