Good day,
I am tasked with creating a sales report listing the Top N and Bottom N articles with particular characteristics.
I'm having the problem that, after applying new selection criteria that were recently decided upon, the result is empty.
It turns out the data set itself is not empty, but those records "surviving" the filtering process simply aren't shown.
Looking at the processing order outline in this older post, it makes perfect sense - according to the post, Group Sorting for Top N/Bottom N selection happens in Pre-Pass 2, whereas Group Selection formulas are applied in Pass 2, during page formatting.
In other words, what's happening is this: It takes my records, chooses the Top N groups based on all groups, discards the others, then checks whether the remaining groups should be displayed in the first place, and ultimately decides none of them should be shown, resulting in an empty report.
My primary question is, of course, how to alter this behavior? I need the Top N groups with the particular characteristics chosen by my superiors, not of all and not of none.
I could, of course, go back to the database and do it all there, but that's not exactly the point of buying a tool like CR.
As sort of a Plan B, I suppose/hope I could push both the filtering and the ordering into formulas and penalize the ordering score of those records who won't survive, so that only surviving groups end up in the Top N, and this is what I'll have to attempt if CR isn't up to the task - but I'm not quite sure what's the worth of a tool which can sort and filter, if I ultimately have to do it on my own anyway.
Doing it through Record Selection is not an option, as the selection process is absolutely group-based (e.g. "Show this position if sales in this group were below 100 €." - I need the sum of all records in the group.)
A secondary question, though, would be how this behavior makes sense at all? I understand that having the group selection process late during generation is important for personalization during delivery, but still: If the developer says "I need the Top N groups, and I need the groups with these attributes", it should be obvious that s/he wants the Top N groups of the selected groups, not those groups out of the general Top N who happen to qualify for the selection.
I would appreciate any hints and pointers you may have towards a simple solution to this matter.
Thank you for your time.
(The CR version is 14.0.4.738 RTM, if it makes any difference.)