Hello. I'm new to this but I have some experience with database queries. This is a little long.
I work in a jail and we have a user who has to take a list of inmates who are going to court every morning and look them up in our jail management system (JMS) to see whether they are here or not. I wanted to automate this proce3ss, so I created a Crystal Report where she can enter her list of names and it will query against the database and return the names and DOBs of all of the inmates that are here. That report works fine.,
Typically, we can upload our reports into our JMS and users can enter their own parameters and run reports. However, the GUI on the JMS does not allow for multiple variables. I found a way that I can automatically run reports out of Crystal Reports using Powershell and the Task Scheduler, but to do that she will need to ber able to input her list of names. I tried adding a csv as a datasource and running the report to match the first and last names between the database and the csv but that crashed Crystal Reports. A little poking around and I discovered that the method I was using was pulling down all of the entries from the large database and then querying them against the csv, which, of course, was undesirable. One recommendation I found was to create an "outer shell report" that creates a string from the csv that I could then use to query the DB.
I wasn't sure what that meant, so I tried creating a second report that queries the csv and uses a function to create a lastname-comma-firstname string. Then I used my original working report as a subreport and used the linking feature to pass my @names function into the parameter. And it worked!
...sort of.
Now the report runs, but instead of creating one large table it creates a table for each entry, with seperate headers and everythinng. Even minimizing the headers and footers leaves a box around each entry, and if I try to move the labels out of the subreport page header and into the main report page header I can't get it to line up properly. Does anyone know what I can to to make this look better?