A colleague recently stumbled over the problem that he wanted to group table rows, but did not manage to have a joined cell per group in the first column.
After searching the web, we found this article which basically explained how to achieve the right version of the following picture, not the left one:
I basically tried it with my own example and just outline the steps to take here.
1. I used my example that has two data sets, one for persons, one for groups and finally a joined data set that combines both. I derived a table with "Group" in the first column and "Person" in the second. Looks like this:
The report is rendered as:
2. I added a group to the table, setting "Group on" on the group's name, so basically the attribute of the first column. After that the design looks like this:
And the report like that:
As you can see, an additional heading row is introduced that shows the group label once when the group starts. What we now want to achieve is that this group label is only shown once and all cells are joined.
And that's where the magic (or nightmare starts). Originally we tried to move the cell from the "Group Header" row to the "Content Row" but that doe snot succeeded. The trick is to select the group header cell (it must be the cell, not the data element) and got to the properties tab. There is a drop down named "Drop" here which has to be set to "Detail".
That means the header cell is "dropped" to all detail rows. The extra cell with the data binding in the detail row can be removed. Looks like this now:
And finally we get:
You can find the sample design attached.
Happy Reporting
Jan
