Forum Discussion

TeresaRay's avatar
TeresaRay
Qrew Member
6 years ago

Hiding a Linked Report Field when there are no values

I tried to do an argument to hide the linked reports if there weren't any values but they are still showing on my project profile. Is there a way to hide a table report embedded in a project profile if there are no records in it?

I have already tried the following argument with no luck:
If <linked field> = to blank then hide <linked field>

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Teresa Ray
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Formulas and functions
Relationships
  • LauraThacker's avatar
    LauraThacker
    Qrew Captain
    6 years ago
    Teresa,
    What you need is a summary field that will tell you if there are any child-records in that table.  If it is a directly-connected table; then you simply build a summary field to count the number of records; and write your rule from that.  If the records are held in another table further down, but not directly connected; you will need to pass them "up" through the relationships so you can use it to write your rule.

    Think, however, also that if you do not see the embedded report, you have no visual confirmation that there are /are not records.  Having the embedded report show "no records found" confirms that there are no connected records.

    While I support the "clean" look of a form that does not show all the embedded reports when there are no child records; I usually recommend at the very least displaying the [Total # of Child Records] fields so there is still a visual-confirmation of the existence or not of records.

    It is easy to assume that not seeing a section/embedded report means that there are no records; whereas other users might know there should be some and something has gone wrong (orphaned records).

    Consider both sides of the argument to see or not to see the information.

    ​​

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    Laura Thacker (IDS)
    laura@intelligentdbs.com
    (626) 771 0454
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    • TeresaRay's avatar
      TeresaRay
      Qrew Member
      6 years ago
      Thanks for the response Laura. 

      It's not a numeric value so the summary field would be difficult to use as I am not trying to count the child records, I just want to display the information as is.  Sorry for not being more specific - What I have is three different fields capturing the same table, just displaying different columns. I don't want the profile to display all three of them at once so if either one of the others have information in them, I want to hide the other two.  Is there a way to hide two fields if the third one has information?

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      Teresa Ray
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      • LauraThacker's avatar
        LauraThacker
        Qrew Captain
        6 years ago
        Teresa,

        So what you really need is a formula field in your table of records which "compiles" the value from one of the 3 relationships into a single value that you can display as a single column in your embedded report.

        In this case, you can build a formula-text field.  Let's just assume you want to display the proxy-field value from one of the three relationships to determine which "parent" the record is connected to.

        Formula-Text field: [Parent Record]

        List(",",[Related Reference Field 1 Proxy],[Related Reference Field 2 Proxy],[Related Reference Field 3 Proxy])​

        This formula will display the proxy field value from the only relationship that is populated, for a single-output formula.




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        Laura Thacker (IDS)
        laura@intelligentdbs.com
        (626) 771 0454
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