DSP® Application Development

Create Report Groups

The view used to render a report can contain denormalized data. Such data can be organized into a hierarchically structured report using Report groups. Report groups can be defined at the page level for Dynamic and Report page types.

To demonstrate, a view that joins the Customers, Order and Order Details tables produces a denormalized data set. This data set contains redundant information as shown in the following table:

CustomerID	Name	OrderID	OrderNumber	ProductID	Product
42	John Doe	1001	2007010201	00099	T-Shirt
42	John Doe	1001	2007010201	00202	Shoes
24	Jane Doe	1002	2007010202	00099	T-Shirt

This example contains two customers, each with a single order. John Doe’s order contains two line items. Consequently, the customer and order information has been repeated for the second line item. Only the ProductID and Product fields are different for the second row.

The advantage to a denormalized data set is that much, if not all, of the relevant data can be retrieved with a single query. Otherwise, building a multi-level report requires several page requests. The total processing time can be greatly reduced by combining related data into a single view.

If the report generator obtains this data from the Customers, Orders and Order Details pages separately, a request to the Customers page is created to retrieve the customer information. Then two requests to the Orders page to retrieve the order headers for each customer are created and two requests to the Order Details page to retrieve the order line items for the two orders are created. This approach does not scale well when adding a customer with a single order results in two additional page requests, one request for the order header information and one for the order’s line items.

In most cases, the overhead of processing many additional page requests outweighs the overhead incurred from loading the duplicate data and organizing the data set with report groups.

To create a report group:

1. Select Admin > WebApps in the Navigation pane.
2. Click the Pages icon for a WebApp.
3. Click Vertical View for a Dynamic or Report page type.

4. Either

   For a Dynamic page type, click the Report Options tab, and then click the Report Groups icon.

   Or

   For a Report page type, click the Report Groups icon.

5. Click Add.

   View the field descriptions for the Report Groups page

6. Enter a report name in NAME field.

7. Enter a title in TITLE field.

   NOTE: Title is not a required field. The Title displays above each occurrence of the group in the report.

8. Select a view from VIEW list box.

   NOTE: Report Groups support a Horizontal and Vertical View Type. In the previous example, customer information and order headers are rendered in a vertical fashion with fields stacked on top of one another. Order line items are rendered horizontally with each record on its own line.

9. Click PAGE BREAK BEFORE check box, if applicable.

10. Click PAGE BREAK AFTER check box, if applicable.

    NOTE: Page breaks force a break either before or after a given report group. For example, to force each customer onto its own page, click Page Break Before check box for the Customer group.

11. Click HIDE EMPTY FIELDS check box, if applicable.

    NOTE: Hide Empty Fields controls which fields are omitted from the rendered report. Fields that are null or contain zero length strings are hidden. Enabling this field can cut down report space. This option only applies to vertical report groups, those report groups with a VIEW of Vertical on the Report Groups page.

12. Click Save.

Next, Add Columns to a Report.