Raiser's Edge custom report not suppressing blank rows

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.

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.

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!


 

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. 

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.