Progress
Report Builder
User’s Guide


Types of Expressions

Expressions are classified by the data type of the results they produce. Table 6–1 lists the types of calculated expressions.

Table 6–1: Types of Calculated Expressions
Data Type
Produces
Example
CHARACTER
Characters or character strings
“Dear ” + FIRSTNAME + “,” produces a character string that is a salutation, such as “Dear John,”. Character strings can also include numbers and punctuation marks and a space after “Dear”.
NUMERIC
Numbers
(Qty * Price) - Disc-Rate(Qty * Price) produces the value of the Extended-Price. You can use numeric expressions as logical expressions because Report Builder considers a logical expression to be true when it has a nonzero value and false when it has a zero value.
DATE
Dates
Order-Date + 30 produces what the date will be 30 days later than the date in the Order-Date field.
LOGICAL
Logical value of true or false
Balance > 100 produces a true value if the value in the balance field is greater than 100, a false value if the balance is less than or equal to 100.
MEMO
Memo field
IIF (Balance = 0, Thanks, Sendcash) means that if the balance equals 0, return the THANKS memo field; otherwise, return the SENDCASH memo field.

Only expressions that contain memo fields can produce memo fields. It is not possible to convert from any other data type to a memo field.


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