Oracle BI Publisher Blog

Dave M followed up with a question on the regrouping totals post from a day or two ago.

Would it be possible to reference the group sum values from outside of the loop? For instance, if you wanted to have a separate table at the bottom of the report that contained the department totals for each department.

Of course the answer is 'Yes', but of course there are several ways you could tackle it. You could use our updatable variables to track totals against each department as you move through the XML tree. Not ideal and probably expensive.

You could loop through everything again in the summary section.

<?for-each-group:ROW;DNAME?> 
 <?DNAME?> <?sum(current-group()/SAL)?> 
<?end for-each-group?>

Its another pass thru the data which could be expensive on a very large report. The fastest way to get the summary is going to be to have the summarization at the extract layer. Another alternative might be to build a dynamic XML tree and then use that to render the values. I think this would be just as expensive as the solution above thou - I might be wrong thou.