Should concatenation take place in query or report? What about formatting?

[catluvr]

Hello All!

I wasn't sure if this was a query question or a report question.

I'm helping out my daughter. She has several number fields that ultimately need a unit of measure (UOM) added to them. She also has a few fields will be ultimately be shown as percentages.

Where should that take place? I must admit, I never thought about it. I have some that concatenate the UOM in a query and others that do it in the report.

She says she is having some rounding issues ... I can't show it to you because it always works fine for me.

So, if the steps to the report are:

Master Table
Query 1 - data from master table
Query 2 - query 1 + a few other tables
Query 3 - query 2 + another query
Report - based on query 3

Where is the best place to add "/ft" or make a decimal show as a percent?

Or does it really matter?

Thanks!




Susie
Kansas

[CJ_London]

Where is the best place to add "/ft" or make a decimal show as a percent?

leave all formatting and presentation to the final view, i.e. the form or report. queries are for managing/processing data, not presentation.

Edit: Happy to argue you could use query3 as your 'final' view, it is my personal preference to do so in the form/report because they are about presentation.

Do not forget the format property of a control - you can use that without changing the underlying value

[ranman256]

do all you can in the query. then in the report, just pick the field.