The Director’s Chair
Time Saver
New Feature
Advanced Techniques
The Resource Analyzer Challenge
FOCUS 101
by Thomas Trifon and
Sheldon Smith
Quick Tips
User Group Meeting Schedule

Dynamic Report Sorting

When you wish to provide customers with a generic report offering a limited number of sort options, here is a simple but elegant way to do so. Remember that FOCUS limits you to 32 BY fields.

-DEFAULT &S1=' ', &S2=' ', &S3=' ', &S4=' '
-DEFAULT &BY1=' ', &BY2=' ', &BY3=' ', &BY4=' '

-* USE A SIMPLE CRTFORM TO GET THE DESIRED SORT ORDER FROM YOUR USERS.

-CRTFORM LINE 1
-"ENTER THE NUMBER OF THE ORDER YOU WANT YOUR REPORT SORTED BY:"
-"  "
-"COUNTRY:<&S1>  CAR:<&S2>  MODEL:<&S3>  BODYTYPE:<&S4>"
-"  "
-"PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE"

-* USE THE SEQUENCE NUMBER ENTERED BY THE USER AS A VARIABLE TO GENERATE
-* THE BY POSITION AND ASSOCIATE THE CORRECT FIELDNAME TO THAT POSITION.

-* THIS IS THE QUICK TIP:
-SET &CTR=0;
-LAB1
-SET &CTR=&CTR+1;
-SET &POSITION=&S.&CTR;
-SET &FLD=DECODE &CTR(1 'COUNTRY' 2 'CAR' 3 'MODEL' 4 'BODYTYPE' ELSE ' ');
-SET &BY.&POSITION=IF &FLD NE ' ' THEN 'BY ' | &FLD  ELSE ' ' ;
-IF &CTR LT 4 GOTO LAB1;

TABLE FILE CAR
SUM SALES AS 'UNITS'
&BY1   &BY2
&BY3   &BY4
WHERE UNITS NE 0
END
-RUN

Back Next