Ideas for a table with a variable number of tables?

Working with 8.1.0.

I am attempting to make a report that shows equipment downtime where the alarms are categorized into (potentially) 10 different categories.

The report will look like this -

The tables labeled 1 and 2 are the firs two categories that could likely appear. It’s possible that there will only be one category (and thus one table) or up to 10 categories requiring 10 tables.

My first idea is that I am going to have to make 10 reports, 1 with 1 table, 1 with 2 tables, etc, and then when the user opens up the report preview in Vision, I see how many datasets I get back and choose the report with the appropriate number of tables.

Alternatively I was thinking (and mostly hoping) a table group with 10 tables with hardcoded data keys, many of which would be left blank if say there only 3 categories were used, and hope that the empty ones would just not appear at all.

Has anyone done anything like this and what was your approach?

I’ve done something similar. I would definitely use a table group for this. If you have a table header and/or summary line for each child table, that will show up regardless of the presence of data. No space will be taken by empty data rows so you won’t waste a lot of space with just the headers.

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Excellent. Hopefully the customer is ok with headers and summary without rows - I would make the argument it makes sense to have that so week to week the reports look the same and are easily comparable. If something with no data and then has no headers and summary one week and the next week it does and appears, I think that would mean more confusion if you look at two reports side by side.

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When I do actually want to leave out parts of a report, the instances of a nested table with zero rows will simply disappear.