Progress
Report Builder
User’s Guide
Creating Aggregate Fields
You can define an aggregate field to calculate summary information such as a total or an average for any field in the tables used by your report, except a memo field. There are two parts to creating an aggregate field:
Specifying the Mandatory Aggregate Information
The mandatory field information is the information necessary to create the new field. Follow these steps to specify the mandatory aggregate information:
- Choose Calculations
Aggregate Field. If there are aggregate fields defined for the report, the Aggregate Fields dialog box appears:
![]()
If there are no aggregate fields defined for the report, the New Aggregate dialog box appears. See Step 2.
- Choose New to create a new aggregate field. The New Aggregate dialog box appears:
![]()
- Specify the field name in the Name fill-in field. Field names follow the same rules as 4GL field names. They can be up to 32 characters long and can consist of alphabetic characters (A-Z or a-z), digits (0-9), and special characters ($, &, #, %, -, and _). In addition, field names must begin with a letter (A-Z or a-z). The field name must also be unique within the report and cannot contain spaces.
- Choose the appropriate radio button to specify the type of field you want to create. There are seven different types of aggregate fields.
When you apply the Minimum and Maximum types to a character field, they use the case sensitivity defined for the character field.
- Select the field for which you want to compute the aggregate from the Field selection list. If you select Total, Average, Std. Deviation, or Variance, Report Builder displays only numeric fields in the Field list box. Table 5–5 shows the valid aggregate types for each field data type.
- Select when you want to reset the value of the field to zero from the Reset selection list.
Once you specify the reset value, you are finished defining the mandatory field information. You can now either choose OK or choose Options to access the optional field information.
- Choose OK or Options.
Specifying the Optional Aggregate Information
If you chose the Options button, the New Aggregate dialog box expands to display additional options:
![]()
Follow these steps to specify the optional field information:
- Select how often you want to increment the value of the aggregate field from the Accumulation selection list.
- Choose when you want Report Builder to process the aggregate. Final Pass is the default.
- Specify what types of values you want the aggregate field to ignore. The default value is to include all values, including UNKNOWN and blank values. The choices are:
- Choose the Case-Sensitive option if you want the field’s result to be case sensitive. This option is valid only when the aggregate is a Minimum or Maximum aggregate and the field being aggregated is a character field. Table 5–6 lists the case sensitivity for aggregate fields.
- Choose OK to create the field. The Aggregate Fields dialog box appears.
- Choose Close to return to the report layout.
Copyright © 2004 Progress Software Corporation www.progress.com Voice: (781) 280-4000 Fax: (781) 280-4095 |