BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Last Week in the Forums: Filtering Blank Spaces from Distinct Count Aggregation, Adding a Line at 0 in a Chart with Negative Values, and more...

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. The forums continue to be very busy as the year rolls on towards the halfway point! As always, thanks to those members who are helping answer questions. It is a great help to the community!

The first topic for this week is about filtering out the blank spaces from the count in a distinct count aggregation. The poster had 2 columns in their table and an aggregation in the footer to count the distinct values in the column. Sometimes one column would have a value and the other wouldn't, but the blank space would still be counted. The way to get around this is to add a filter to your aggregation to filter out the blank or null spaces from the count.

The second topic I'll cover this week is about adding a line at 0 in a chart with negative values. The poster had a chart that had negative values. When this happens, the x-axis stays at the bottom of the chart instead of the negative bars coming below the x-axis, but the poster wanted a line to separate the positive from the negative. The suggested solution was to add a marker line at 0 on the y-axis.

The last topic I'll discuss from last week is about finding the difference between rows in a group. The poster had groups in their chart separating job ID's into separate groups. They had different states for the different jobs with timestamps for each update. They wanted to find the time between the rows for each group with the first line in each group not having a value since there is no line before it. The solution was to create a variable to store the last value in and compute the time between the two rows. This variable was to be reset in the footer of each group so that the first row of the group would not have a value. A sample report can be found in the thread.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.