Raiser's Edge custom report not suppressing blank rows

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Hi there,


In Crystal Reports, we suppressed blank rows for Phones using this article (https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/75439) and it looks like it worked great in the Preview mode... but when we use RE Custom Report to export the results, the blank rows are there, including the colon that is between the Phone Type and Phone Number..


Does anyone have ideas to help to solve this problem?


Thanks in advance!


 
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  • Without seeing the exact setup of your report it's hard to say exactly what the problem is, but you've mentioned that the colon is still showing for the blank lines - do you have your phone type and phone number fields inside a text box with a colon in between them, by any chance? If so, Crystal won't suppress those lines without a phone type and number as it doesn't consider the text boxes to be blank, due to the colon. You could try moving the fields out of the text box and having the colon by itself in a separate text box between the two fields? The alignment might not look as great but it should then suppress the blank rows.


  • Thanks very much Alan, I will give that a try! The info is in a text box but I will try to move it out of the text box and see if the blank fields still show up in RE. 


    The strange thing is that in the Preview in Crystal reports, the blank lines are suppressed as expected...However when I use RE custom reports to do the export, that's when the blank lines show up...


     
  • I have very seldom used that type of suppression.  Most of the time I use the suppression formula instead.  Open the Section Expert, select the row in question and click the formula button to the right of Suppress.   You can then enter a Boolean formula something like isnull(fieldname).  If the field in question is null, then the row will suppress.  If not, then it will be visible.


    I will often use formulas instead of individual fields.  For instance for address lines where there is a Street Address 1 and a Street Address 2, I will say for the Street formula something like, If isnull(street address 2) then street address 1 else street address 1 + chr(13) + street address 2.  If you don't know it chr(13) issues a line feed and drops the second part down to a new line.
  • Marie Stark
    Marie Stark Community All-Star
    Ancient Membership 1,000 Likes 500 Comments Photogenic

    I also do not use that type of suppression. Like Chester, I use a formula. You can also do this with individual fields.

    Chester, thank you for the tip on the line feed.  I usually add in a blank section if there is no address, but this seems like it would be simpler.

     

  • F. O.:

    Hi there,


    In Crystal Reports, we suppressed blank rows for Phones using this article (https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/75439) and it looks like it worked great in the Preview mode... but when we use RE Custom Report to export the results, the blank rows are there, including the colon that is between the Phone Type and Phone Number..


    Does anyone have ideas to help to solve this problem?


    Thanks in advance!


     

    In additon to everything else that's been suggested, if you're running RE 7.94 or higher you may run into some quirks that others don't get.  Blackbaud seems to have changed the built-in report viewer to some unknown higher version of CR, but we still have CR XI as the highest supported version for creating Custom Reports, which has led to some big issues that have been discussed in other threads here.  That may be why the report looks fine in CR, but incorrect when run from inside RE.



  • Thank you everyone!!! I will try out the suggestions to get rid of the text box and use forumulas and follow up to see if that works.


    FYI we are hosted by Blackbaud and have the latest version of RE (and I guess CR?)...fingers crossed that the problem is on my end and not related to any version related issues...
  • I have not heard RE say one way or the other, but remember the Viewers are usually third party and not developed by Crystal Reports.  This can often lead to missing functionality.  And, FYI, the true Crystal Reports viewer is one of the worst ones out there, so don't blame someone for not using it. 
  • Many thanks everyone, using formulas instead helped get rid of the duplicate lines when running the report in RE :D
  • Just an FYI, if you are exporting data from a Crystal Report into a comma-delimited file, your conditional formatting on fields or sections will not carry over to the .CSV file.  For example, if you are conditionally suppressing sections and then you export that into a comma-delimited file, opening that file in Excel will show blank rows where they should have been suppressed.  The fix, as you found, is to remove condional formatting.

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