Unusual Report Help Needed

[faaslave]

Here is the scoop:

I have employees

each employee belongs to an area and to a crew

I need a to make report that looks like the following:

Area <> Report

Header

-----------------------------------------------------

Sat/Sun........Sun/Mon............Mon/Tue etc.

Bill..................Steve..................Dave

Lisa.................Amy...................Doug

Fred................Harry..................Lydia

Bruce..............-----

-----..............Donna<--trainee

John<--trainee

(..........are spaces)

body

------------------------------------------------------

So the report would find all the area f employees

look at their crew number

Then list them in columns under the correct day's off

The crew number knows what days off they are

Some employees are trainees

I would want it to sort the employees that are not trainees first

then the trainees next

also it must slide up in each column, all crews do not have the same amount of employees

I have never done a report like this before, and I am hoping it is possible. I tried using the column feature, no luck.

Thanks Dave

[DukeS]

You can do it easily with report like this:

<>

Sat/Sun

...John

...Joe

Sun/Mon

...Mary

...Jim

...

Trainee

...Doug

You just use subummary parts and sort found set on them.

Or you can use repeating fields for each group Sat/Mon,... ( they can be printed in columns with sliding options, but you are limited with number of people that goes into repeating field )

HTH

[David McQueen]

FileMaker does not natively support what you want to do. It wants to report down, not across. This having been said, if you can assign days off to each person and a designation of trainee or non trainee to each person, you can set up a relationship of days off to people. Once you do that you have a few options.

1. You could report in multiple portals, probably simplest, sorting the portal by designation and name to put the trainees at the bottom. Then have as many portals for days off relationships as required across the page.

2. More convoluted. Use these relationships to create value lists of people for each set of days off. Use a set field with contents of the value list to get your lists of people and then plunk these results into global fields for your report.

3. Still convoluted. Script multiple finds for each set of people. Go to a layout with only one field and use a copy all records step to get a people list and then plunk that into global fields that form the report.

4. With 2 and 3 above you get lists of people separated by carriage returns. You can use calculated fields with substitutions to change these carriage returns to say ", Space" in the lists.

HTH

Dave McQueen

[faaslave]

Well I am not sure I fully understand your solution. One thing is for sure, it must be in columns, on one page, in landscape mode. We print these sheets up all the time, and they are very handy.

They have boxes around them like this:

-------

| Marc |

| |

---------

best I can do with this text field, but I think you get the idea.

We use Access right now, and it seems to do it well. I am trying to convert everything to Filemaker.

Thanks Dave

[Genx]

Hi Dave,

There are a few ways you could do this... though they are really work arounds...

The first, is as David suggested -- use portals, simply seven portals -- each filtered to a week day, maybe 100 rows on each portal (just in case) and then sliding up on every portal

Your second option... is to write a script to do a search for each individual day off, loop through the records, collect and return delimit them and finally, set a global corresponding to that day with the result... to be honest the portal sounds easier so i'll leave it at that.

Always convoluted but.. as David says, the most straight forward way is probably through portals.

[faaslave]

Well you and Dave were correct. The portal idea worked out great.

Thanks Dave

[David McQueen]

Well you and Dave were correct. The portal idea worked out great.

Thanks Dave

LOL ... Much welcome.

That's what forums like this are for. It stops too many FileMaker programmers from having flat foreheads from hitting them on the desk. ???

[Genx]

All this Dave...ing is seriously confusing...

But re: the flat foreheads... lol, so true.