Custom Report Sorting Bugs
Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 9:01 pm
So I forgot about the Birthday List that you can print out per organization, which is definitely the better way to do this.
Regardless, I created a custom report to make a birthday list for one specific organization. The only criterion was "Organization Class is Elders 1." The Column Order was as follows: Birthday, Preferred Name, Primary Phone Number, and Address - Street 1.
The problem was with the sort order when viewing the report. By default, it sorted by the first column, being Birthday. However, it was not sorted correctly. It went Jan through Dec, followed by one unknown birthday (a non-member record), and then proceeded to do more known birthdays Jan through Dec again. There were no repeats in the list and it was about half and half of the quorum in each Jan through Dec list. To clarify, it's just one report and one view, but the sorting didn't correctly apply to the list in its entirety.
To see if perhaps sort was just bad for the Birthday field (being of the format "DD MMM", or 01 Jan for example), I tried removing the Birthday field and using Birth Month and Birth Day as the first two displayed and sorted fields. This did not improve my results and in fact appeared to be sorted in the exact same incorrect manner.
I have also tried clicking on the column headers to see if I could somehow refresh the sort to see if it improved. The first click on Birthday did nothing (as that was already the default sort), then the second click sorted it descending, and then the third click sorted it ascending again. Surprisingly, it did improve the sorting quite a bit, but didn't completely correct it. This time all but about 3 birthdays sorted in the first "half" of the list, then the blank birthday, and then the second "half" of the list contained 2 Jan birthdays that for some reason didn't get grouped with the rest of the Jan birthdays. The same weird sorting "improvement" happened when trying Birth Month and Birth Day in place of Birthday.
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I have found the Birthday List report for each organization and that is certainly the better way to do this. But I think this exercise has uncovered bugs in the Custom Reports module.
I want to also note the unique factors in my unit that don't apply to the majority of units and could be contributing to the odd behaviors. My ward has 2 Elders' Quorums and we also have that non-member record that is local to our unit (I actually have a question about that, and I have started another thread: http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3796; it appears I have a temporary record and a nonmember record for this individual and only the temporary record with no birth date is making it into this custom report). I could see how one of those two factors could be throwing a wrench into the works.
One last thing, I just noticed that the sorting when you break up the birthday into two columns (Month and Day), the sorting for the second column (Day) does not happen at all. I would assume the default sort should always be First Column, Second Column, Third Column, etc. and not merely First Column. I remember us talking about sort orders before (and perhaps Alan_Brown can help me remember this past discussion), but I just can't think why it would make sense to only sort the first column by default, and not follow on down the rest of the columns for sorting.
Can others reproduce these bugs?
Thanks in advance.
Regardless, I created a custom report to make a birthday list for one specific organization. The only criterion was "Organization Class is Elders 1." The Column Order was as follows: Birthday, Preferred Name, Primary Phone Number, and Address - Street 1.
The problem was with the sort order when viewing the report. By default, it sorted by the first column, being Birthday. However, it was not sorted correctly. It went Jan through Dec, followed by one unknown birthday (a non-member record), and then proceeded to do more known birthdays Jan through Dec again. There were no repeats in the list and it was about half and half of the quorum in each Jan through Dec list. To clarify, it's just one report and one view, but the sorting didn't correctly apply to the list in its entirety.
To see if perhaps sort was just bad for the Birthday field (being of the format "DD MMM", or 01 Jan for example), I tried removing the Birthday field and using Birth Month and Birth Day as the first two displayed and sorted fields. This did not improve my results and in fact appeared to be sorted in the exact same incorrect manner.
I have also tried clicking on the column headers to see if I could somehow refresh the sort to see if it improved. The first click on Birthday did nothing (as that was already the default sort), then the second click sorted it descending, and then the third click sorted it ascending again. Surprisingly, it did improve the sorting quite a bit, but didn't completely correct it. This time all but about 3 birthdays sorted in the first "half" of the list, then the blank birthday, and then the second "half" of the list contained 2 Jan birthdays that for some reason didn't get grouped with the rest of the Jan birthdays. The same weird sorting "improvement" happened when trying Birth Month and Birth Day in place of Birthday.
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I have found the Birthday List report for each organization and that is certainly the better way to do this. But I think this exercise has uncovered bugs in the Custom Reports module.
I want to also note the unique factors in my unit that don't apply to the majority of units and could be contributing to the odd behaviors. My ward has 2 Elders' Quorums and we also have that non-member record that is local to our unit (I actually have a question about that, and I have started another thread: http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3796; it appears I have a temporary record and a nonmember record for this individual and only the temporary record with no birth date is making it into this custom report). I could see how one of those two factors could be throwing a wrench into the works.
One last thing, I just noticed that the sorting when you break up the birthday into two columns (Month and Day), the sorting for the second column (Day) does not happen at all. I would assume the default sort should always be First Column, Second Column, Third Column, etc. and not merely First Column. I remember us talking about sort orders before (and perhaps Alan_Brown can help me remember this past discussion), but I just can't think why it would make sense to only sort the first column by default, and not follow on down the rest of the columns for sorting.
Can others reproduce these bugs?
Thanks in advance.