How to display "blanks" in report detail section (1 Viewer)

[RHubbard]

I’m working with a data base designed for the textual analysis of Ancient Greek documents (now in its 5th year of development).

One of the problems that I have yet to resolve fully is a way to create grammatical data output (a report) in a rather unusual format.

Specifically I need to display a matrix of six different verb tenses (as column headings) and six different person-number classifications as rows.

I have figured out how to make words appear under the correct column (tense) heading. My problem is the rows (detail sections).The person-number classifications (detail records) are 1 per sing, 2 per sing, 3 per sing 1 per plu 2 per plu and 3 per plu. These classifications have already been tagged to each verb in the 400,000 item database and so it is easy enough to extract them.

My issue is this: For each verb selected for reporting I want the report to show all six person-number classifications as labels on the left-most column and the verb forms under the six tense columns. What is tricky is that I want a blank box to appear in the detail section of the report even when there is no data that matches the selection criteria for that particular verb.

My objective is to produce single page reports (for each verb) that show not only the word forms that are actually present but that will also display blank boxes where a word form WOULD BE if it existed in the text’s data base. The purpose of all this is to produce pages that are uniform in appearance.

If this is confusing, I can provide a screen shot of how the report should look.

Thanks for the help.

Rick

 

[KeithG]

Can you attach a copy of you db and a screen shot. Its sounds like to me you need a left join to produce the blank boxes in your query.

 

[RHubbard]

Thanks for the reply-

I have attached a pdf file showing what the "report" looks like now and what I want it to look like when it is properly formatted.

I've not included a copy of the datbase because it is close to 50 GB.

If you can make sense out of all this, some advice would be very much appreciated. On the otherhand, if it looks like something that is just too complicated (or impossible, even), you are certainly welcome to say, "Its Greek to me" and leave me to my misery.


Thanks again,

Rick

 

[lightray]

Did you find a solution to this problem? lightray

 

[gemma-the-husky]

if your final query consists of 6 columns representing verb cases, then surely the blanks already exist - or does your current data consist of a 2-column table showing the case and the verb, and you are trying to turn it into a grid?

if the latter then I would create a temporary table with 6 columns, one for each verb case, run 1 query to append all the verbs, then 6 more to update the approrpiate column for the verb case. - that way the blanks are not a problem

now you have a simple table which will produce your report directly.

this idea any good?


re-reading your original post now, i see more- you want a single page for each verb, so that along the top, you get the tenses, and for each verb down the side you get 6 cases.

so you can still use my 6 column table idea, but you probably need either to populate this for a single verb, or better still include extra columns for a) verb root, and b) sort order for cases, so that your table is properly sorted, and populate it for every verb.

do you really have 50Gb data??



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