Sorting by Summary field

[spankalee]

I'm trying to make a sales report that lists all our customers and their sales total for a certain period and sorts the customers by sales.

I had been doing this sort of thing by using a complex relationship between customer and invoice line items with globals for the date range and a calculation field that summed the line items.

That worked, but was pretty slow and I though it wasn't the "FileMaker way" since I wasn't using Summary fields. I also need to do some other reports where this approach was getting too complicated.

So I'm trying to do it with Summary fields and it's mostly all good except that I can't sort by the sales totals.

What's up with that? Who wouldn't want a report with sub-summaries sorted by the summary field?

There must be a pretty simple and well-known way around this. Can someone enlighten me?

Thanks

[comment]

See Help > Finding, sorting, and replacing data > Sorting records > Sorting records by subsummary values.

[spankalee]

Thanks comment,

That certainly looks like it should work, but the total sales (the summary field) disappears when reordering.

[comment]

It does work. I'm afraid I can't guess what your difficulty might be without more info.

[spankalee]

Hmm...

I think I figured it out. My report layout is in a different file from my Invoice table. I re-created the layout in the Invoices file and it worked.

Is there a reason it wouldn't work in a external file?

Thanks

[comment]

Interesting - I just tried this and it does disappear, in version 7 as well as in version 8.0v1. Looks like a bug.

[spankalee]

That's a bummer, but I can work around it I guess.

Just one more reason for me to switch to a single file solution.

Thanks again.

edit: I'm using 8.5. I just submitted a bug report. Hope I described it well enough.

Edited July 20, 2006 by Guest