[jas.]

So, starting a new thread just to be sure that I have this correct and it's in one place:

Assuming you're using export and not reporting directly off the back end, to solve the glitch (or, to accommodate the fixed glitch) in Crystal XI, you merely need to open the report and change all the links to Left Outer Join.

1. Is this correct? The smart linking will have lined up and linked up the tables in such a way that this is the only change needed, right?
2. Are there any links that shouldn't be changed?
3. I think this is the case, but I just want to be sure -- after you fix the links in the report, when users run it as a custom report the links don't have to be re-fixed every time, do they?

Thanks.

[DrewAllen]

It all depends on what you want to appear on your report. If you want to show records without X, then the link to the table containing X has to be a left outer join, but if you only want to show records with X you can leave it as an inner join.

For example, if you are doing a proposal pipeline, you only want to include constituents that have (active) proposals. You can safely leave that as an inner join.

On the other hand, you may want to do a prospect report that includes proposals. You want all prospects whether they have proposals or not, so you need to make the link to proposals a left outer join.

If you include the spouse on any of your reports, you will almost always want to make that a left outer join. Otherwise you will only get constituents with spouses.

On the other hand, everybody has a preferred address (even if all of the address info is blank), so there is no need to change that link to a left outer join.

If you are running your reports from a BB export, you will never run into a problem by making all of your joins left outer joins, so if you are unsure, change it to a left outer join. This will also hold true for reports based on most other data sources, but I cannot guarantee that it will be true in all cases.

Drew

[jas.]

Thanks Drew.

As it turned out, my issue with my monthly report was due to this very problem -- the report was looking through and counting all 10,000 records four times before it actually put out any information.