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"Top five" style reports with Midas
Thu 28 Jul 2005, 03:20 PM
I had a long time customer contact me because the screenshot I posted (slightly larger version below) reminded him of a question:
I know Midas is flexible and makes these nested reports, but I need a Top Five style report sorted by the total sales posted by each sales person.  Do I have to pre-process all the sales, sort them and then create a report or can Midas do this somehow?
It took me a few minutes to be sure.  I remember that this used to be one of the (very few) popular features of ReportLogic, our ill fated report writer, but ReportLogic used custom API code to do it.  Then it struck me.  I just need to put the total in the tab label, sort the table tab label, which Midas can do, remove all but the first five rows, then clean up the tab labels.  I added this to the Report It! sample db to be sure I was right.

This added a bit of code, although it took away some code too, as it never creates the nested tabbed table.  It simply creates a tab for each city/state combination, adds totals to their tabs, sorts by tab value, removes extra rows (all 63 of them) and then cleans up the remaining tab labels.  You could do the same thing with collapsed sections, and I might add that as well to the Report It! sample.

Report It! sample db - Create nested tabbed tables before Top 5 processing




Report It! sample db - Create Top Five Performing Cities


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Need help with Midas screenshots
Thu 28 Jul 2005, 08:28 AM
The screen shots I made for CoexEdit have been very popular (see CoexEdit screenshots), partly because they tell a story and partly because people like eye candy (see Ed Brill's comment on Hannover screenshots near the bottom of this post).  Now, I working with our other products, and creating screenshots for those as well.  The first is the Midas Rich Text LSX, since it is our most popular and long lived product.

My first thought was to have a [screenshot] + Midas = [screenshot] layout, like that below, with each screen shot clickable to get a larger version, but even two examples such as these two below lead to redundancy.  The reports example can lead from the view to several different possible reports, so should each one start with the same view screen shot and lead to the report? Should I skip the A + B = C approach and just show the different reports as screen shots?  

My second thought was that I could turn this into a story the way I did with CoexEdit, but I don't think Midas needs explaining in the same way CoexEdit does.  Should I skip the A + B = C approach and just show the end results?  

Finally, whichever way I do this, do you think I should include snippets of Midas code as screenshots or as a page of textual code?

Any ideas?  Any reaction?

Report It! sample db - Create nested tabbed tables







Report It! sample db - Create clickable summary reports





Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

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