Operation Manual

Record Selection
Selecting records
9
Crystal Reports User’s Guide 157
• If the table has a Postal Code field, you could base your record
selection on the range of ZIP codes that apply to California (Postal
Code is between n and N).
• If the table has an Area Code field, you could base your record
selection on California Area Codes (Area Code is one of x, y,....z).
Note:
• If the Area Code is stored in the telephone number field, you will not be
able to do this same record selection using the Select Expert based on
the Area Code. You will have to create a record selection formula using
the formula language to extract the Area Code part of the phone number
and then do record selection based on that.
• As a general rule, if you can base your record selection on a number of
fields (as in this example), you should select an indexed field instead of a
field that is not indexed for better performance.
Using the Select Expert
The Select Expert makes it easy to specify the records you want included in
your report. When you work with the Select Expert, you select the field to which
you want to apply selection conditions and then you specify those conditions.
The Select Expert can be used to set up simple record selection requests. For
example:
• Customers from Arizona.
• Orders in the first quarter.
• Sales over $10,000.
The Select Expert can also be used to set up some sophisticated requests:
• Customers whose names start with “A”, “M”, or “S.”
• Customers from California or Florida who ordered in July.
These are all range limit requests. One or more constants define the range.
The program compares the field value in each record to the constant(s) and
rejects records with values outside the range. The report is limited to values
within the range. You can set up all of these types of record selection requests
without any previous knowledge of the formula language.
Note: The Select Expert can be used to set up both record selection and group
selection requests. When a group name or summary field is selected, the
program knows that the selection criteria set up is intended for group selection.
In all other cases, the program knows that you are setting up record selection.