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Jun 08, 2020 at 07:27 PM

Crystal Reports 2008 (12.7) Top-N report refuses to work

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I'm working on some reports using an old copy of Crystal Reports to do some quick data scanning before throwing it at Tableau for "visuals". This is tabular data in the form of Date, State, County and Deaths (and some other fields similar to Deaths).

I have formed 4 groups (in the following hierarchical order):
1. A header inserted at the top of each page (it uses no data)
2. State
3. County
4. Date

I have two calculated fields:
1. "Max of Date" is for the header at the top
2. "Max of Deaths" is what I use for the "Top N"

I have actually done this succesfully several times after "tweeking" in ways I should have written down, but didn't.
- I have modified several other reports which work with the Top N, but switching tables seems to break it. I can't figure out if there is a particular order that the report has to be built that I have yet to replicate.
- One interesting thing is that in the Formula Workshop there appears to be no mention of the "Max of Date" or "Max of Death", even though Max of Date" is used in the report header Deaths (but "Max of Deaths" has been deleted in the report itself).
- I did build one "from scratch" and left "Max of Deaths" in the County group footer, but that doesn't help with either.
In the Group Sort Expert, it appears to make no difference if the "header", State and Date groups are set to "No Sort" or "All", while the County is set to Top N for "Max of Deaths".
- (Why "Max of Deaths" instead of "Sum of Deaths"? Because these are Cumulative Deaths, not Daily Deaths which are amenable to being "Summed".)

That I have done 3 reports successfully, and this last one keeps failing is (to put it mildly) aggravating. (I did Top-N's a long time ago, and I recall it was just about as "flakey".)

Any thoughts?

(Why 2008 and not 2016? I tried 2016 on trial and found it was incapable of graphing the data I had.)