Usually data is sorted and grouped based
on the values from a field in the report. Sometimes, however, you may want to
group data based on other criteria. Custom groups provide a solution for
grouping data for such needs. For example:
The field exists, but you want to
create collections of groups based on the values in that field.
For example, you may have a Color
field on your report that includes specific color names (Logan Green, Sky Blue,
Emerald Green, Navy Blue, and so on) but you want all shades of each color to
appear as a single group (Greens, Blues, Reds, and so on). In this case you can
build custom groups and manually assign the records you want to be in each
group.
The field exists, but you want to
select specific values or ranges of values for each group.
For example, you might want one group
to contain records where gross sales are less than a certain value, a second
group where gross sales are greater than a certain value, and a final group
where gross sales fall between two values. In this case, you can create custom
groups that use the same range of selection facilities that are available to
you for building record selection queries.
Creating custom groups to perform
specified order grouping provides a solution to these sorting and grouping
challenges. Specified order grouping enables you to create both the customized
groups that will appear on a report and the records that each group will
contain. The only limitation is that a record can be assigned to only one
group.
To follow a procedure where you create
custom groups to rank customers by the amount of business they did in the
previous year, see
Grouping data into intervals.