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