Recreating Hyperion Reports in Access and SSRS (Microsoft Visual Studio 2012) using the Prior and Next Functions

Question

I have several reports in Hyperion that I use the next and prior functions to look at the row right before and/or the row after.

To do this, I sort the data in a certain way to make sure the prior or next functions in hyperion find the right rows above or below the current row. For example, I may sort 2 other rows to get the right sorting for the functions to work correctly.

Now I would like to be able to find a way to recreate these reports in Access and SSRS.

I have been looking for a way to accomplish this in either or both. But at the moment I have not found a way.

If I need a unique field to help with this, I can concatenate between about 4 fields to make a column that has a unique key for each row.

Could anyone point me at a good article or know how to do this? I would really appreciate it very much, thank you!

Answer 1

Using sorting and grouping, probably similar to what you did in Hyperion, you can mostly accomplish this in SSRS using expressions:

• FIRST() will return the first row of your current scope of data

• LAST() will return the last row of your current scope of data

• PREVIOUS() will return the previous row of your current scope of data, or NULL if there are no more previous rows.

Of course, what's missing is something like NEXT(). For whatever reason, Microsoft didn't see fit to include a NEXT() option. Instead, you need to grow your own solution. I see a few common strategies used for this:

• A LOOKUP (or LOOKUPSET/MULTILOOKUP) function against your report dataset, combined with FIRST or ROWNUMBER to get

• Write some custom code to do the sorting/indexing for you, see here for one idea: http://sqlreportsq.blogspot.com/2012/03/can-we-get-next-row-value.html

• Do whatever data maniuplation in you need to do via your SQL using LAG/LEAD