How do we group in BIRT without wasting lines, and still only printing the group item on the first l

Posted by paxdiablo on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by paxdiablo
Published on 2010-03-19T01:56:39Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 2:01 UTC
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When grouping in BIRT, we frequently want the grouping value to show up on the first line as follows:

Group   User             Reputation
------  ---------------  ----------
Admins  Bill The Weasel      51,018
        Mark Grovel         118,101
Users   pax_my_bags          73,554
        Jon Scoot        **,***,*** <- overflow
        clueless             92,928

The normal way of acheiving this is to lay out the group in the designer as follws:

        +---------+--------+--------------+
Tbl Hdr | Group   | User   |   Reputation |
        +---------+--------+--------------+
Grp Hdr | [Group] |        |              |
        +---------+--------+--------------+
Grp Dtl |         | [User] | [Reputation] |
        +---------+--------+--------------+
Grp Ftr |         |        |              |
        +---------+--------+--------------+
Tbl Ftr |         |        |              |
        +---------+--------+--------------+

which, unfortunately, lays out the data in exactly that way, with the grouped value on a different line:

Group   User             Reputation
------  ---------------  ----------
Admins
        Bill The Weasel      51,018
        Mark Grovel         118,101
Users
        pax_my_bags          73,554
        Jon Scoot        **,***,*** <- overflow
        clueless             92,928

This is particularly painful with data where there's lots of groups with only one user since we use twice as much space as needed. If we move the [Group] data item down to the Grp Dtl line, we get it printed for every line in the group.

How, in BIRT, do we merge the two lines Grp Hdr and the first Grp Dtl?

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