Task 5:

Group customer data by credit limit

The report is currently sorted alphabetically by customer name. Recall that in the first tutorial, you specified that the rows in the table be sorted by customer name. In this procedure, you group the data by credit limit in intervals of 50,000. When you group data, BIRT sorts the rows into groups first, then it sorts the rows within each group, assuming that you also specify a sort condition at the table level. As you will see when you complete this task, the data rows within each credit limit group will be sorted by customer name.

1	Choose Layout to return to the layout editor.

2	Right-click the table, and choose Insert Group →Above. New Group, shown in Figure 8‑6, displays the group properties you can set.

Figure 8‑6

New Group

3	Follow these steps to specify grouping by credit limit in intervals of 50000:

1	In Name, type the following text as the group name:

credit_group

2	In Group On, select CREDITLIMIT from the drop-down list.

3	In Interval, select Interval from the drop-down list.

4	In Range, type 50000.

5	Use the default values for the other options. Choose OK.

The table in the report design displays a group header and a group footer row, as shown in Figure 8‑7. The table also shows the data element that the layout editor automatically added to the group header row. This data element serves as the group heading and, in the generated report, displays the first credit limit value of each group.

Figure 8‑7

Group header and group footer rows in a report design

4	Select the [CREDITLIMIT] data element that appears in the group header row. Do not select the [CREDITLIMIT] data element that appears in the detail row.

5	In Property Editor, under Properties, choose General, then choose the B button to format the group heading as bold text.

6

Preview the report. Scroll down the report to view all the data. The report organizes data into four credit limit groups. At the beginning of each group, you see the following numbers in bold: 0, 61100, 113000, 227600. These numbers match the first credit limit value of each group. Within each group, customer names are sorted in alphabetical order. Figure 8‑8 shows one of the four credit limit groups.

Figure 8‑8

Report preview showing one of the four credit limit groups