Output Suppression

When you instruct Report Commander to not produce outputs if your report does not contain data, Report Commander tests for an "empty" report by checking to see how many detail records were selected from the data source. If records were selected, Report Commander treats the report as "not empty." If no records were selected, the report is "empty." Report Commander cannot look for a "blank" report or section like Crystal Reports can.

This can produce results different from what you expect in some situations. For example:

• Your report suppresses display of the Detail section and uses a Group Header to summarize the detail data for output. You then suppress some Groups based on additional criteria. In this case, your report may look blank in Crystal Reports because all of your sections and fields have been suppressed. However, because detail records are present, Report Commander thinks the report has data and performs the export.
• Your main report does not select any records from the database, but has subreports that select data based on report parameters. In this case Report Commander will always think the report is empty because it only looks at the record count for the main report.

In many cases you can redesign your report or your data source to work around this limitation.

More Information

The option to suppress output for empty reports is found in the following locations:

• The Suppress outputs for these parameters if the report does not return any records option in the Project Editor
• The Skip further processing if report contains no data option in the Command Line Builder
• The suppressempty command line option for the Command Runner