We all likely know how to start a report on a child/detail BusinessClass level and bring "down" it's parent/header as column. Add Employee Name and ID fields to an EmployeeCredential report for example.
That technique yields repeating Employee Name and ID data for every EmployeeCredential child row. This is fine and dandy for many many use cases.
But how do you get only ONE row per parent with some relevant child data as a single COLUMN?!
To do this you need to create a DerivedField on the parent that will stringify the child data you want. Here is an example...
StringifyActiveCredentials is a DerivedField
type is Alpha size 2000
ActiveCredentialsTemp = ""
for each EmployeeCredentialRel //use the Relation you need or add your own - LPL Viewer is your friend
ActiveCredentialsTemp = ActiveCredentialsTemp + ", " + each. CredentialDescription
return ActiveCredentialsTemp
This DerivedField would be added on Employee (the parent) and will return something like "Credential X, Credential Y, Credential Z".
You can use the field StringifyActiveCredentials field by adding it as a column on your report, which would be centered on the Employee (parent) BusinessClass then.
PERFORMANCE ALERT!
You must know your data! This technique will retrieve the children for each parent. So 250,000 parents times 10,000 children each or worse 10,000 parents with 250,000 children each. Suggest using sparingly and when there are few child records per parent AND you have a solid Set/Index to find them.
Hope this was useful and clear, please let me know!
