Newbie needs help with CR8.5

[ghines]

Hi all,

This is my first post here and I'm hoping someone can assist me with this problem.

I have to write a CR for an application that is only compatible with CR8.5.

I have three dBase (DBF) tables, ITM, CIT & QTYPRICE. They look like this:

ITM
ID
Description

CIT
ID
ItemID
Description

QTYPRICE
ID
ItemID
UnitPrice
UnitName

I want to link Itm.ID -> CIT.ItemID and Itm.ID -> QTYPRICE.ItemID

For every Itm.ID there's a corresponding CIT.ItemID. However for every Itm.ID there is *not* a corresponding QTYPRICE.ItemID.

If I try and link the tables as above in Visual Linking Expert I get the following 2 errors.

"The link you added causes a link configuration with multiple paths leading from the same table"

and

"Your current link configuration contains multiple starting points"

Is there a workaround this problem using CR8.5?

TIA

Greg

 

[racer25]

You need to use a Left Outer Join for your second join this will select all records from your primary table and any records from your secondary table that match.

 

[ghines]

You need to use a Left Outer Join for your second join this will select all records from your primary table and any records from your secondary table that match.

I would appreciate it if you could tell me how to do this in CR8.5 using DBF files as I can find no way of specifying the type of join.

 

[boblarson]

 

[ghines]

Thanks for the great pictures boblarson, however the SQL Join Type area is all grayed out. Could this be because these are DBF files and not an SQL Database?

 

[boblarson]

How did you link to them. What connection type? Have you tried the OLEDB connection and not ODBC connection?

 

[ghines]

How did you link to them.

By going into Visual Linking Expert and dragging the fields from one table to another table.

What connection type?

A direct connection to each DBF file. eg: d:\data\MyDbfFile.dbf

Have you tried the OLEDB connection and not ODBC connection?

Do not understand why I need to do this when I'm connecting directly to the DBF file.

 

[ghines]

Just found this in the CR8.5 Users Manual. Seems to suggest the link options is only available for SQL Tables.

Crystal Reports enables you to specify the type of join you want to use when
linking SQL tables. An SQL join indicates how linked fields in two SQL tables are
compared when records are read. The SQL Join Type options can be specified in​

the Link Options dialog box.