Course Discussion: Create intermediate groupings

[chuckm65]

Use this thread to ask any questions related to the Create intermediate groupings course in Experience League. Experts are monitoring this thread to ensure your questions are answered.

[SteveOw]

I'd like to group the projects in a portfolio by a custom field in a form. I don't see this field in the grouping options, though I do see other fields from the same form.  Q: This field is type = multiselect, which certainly might complicate grouping.  Is this why the field is unavailable for grouping in tables (and reports)?

[chuckm65]

Yes, multiselect fields are not allowed to be grouped in the reporting system. As you suggested, it would complicate the results. If you had portfolio options of A, B, C, D, E you could end up with groupings of any of the 5 options individually plus additional groupings for any combination of options, such as A-B, B-C, A-B-C, etc. Is this is what you want? If so, there may be a way to do it using a calculated custom field. 

[chuckm65]

After further research I have found that the selections in a multiselect field are not always stored the same way, even if the same selections are made. So if A, B and C are selected for multiple entries they may be stored in one as A-B-C and another as B-A-C, etc, so they wouldn't end up grouped together anyway. 

[SteveOw]

thx for the explanation. I suppose this complicates the calculation needed for the calculated field approach. Unfortunately it's about 7 or 8 possible selections... I'll see if I can do a calculated column to parse out the selections individually, and create a chart where all projects with an <A> selected are in a section. Those with <B> selected are in a bar. and if there's an <A-B> or a <B-A> that project would appear in both?  Seems like it would still fail, as I doubt WF allows projects to appear more than once in a table or Chart. Well - maybe multiple charts would work... 

[chuckm65]

You're right about the fact that you can't have one project appear in two groupings. The list of all results is created first, then the list is grouped based on your criteria. You also can't do calculated expressions in a grouping if you want to use them in a chart. Charts don't recognize calculated expressions, but they do recognize calculated fields. 

But I think there is an easier way to handle all of this for you. If you only have 7 or 8 possible multiple selections, you can just include them in a slightly longer single selection list. Then you could just group on the single selection field. It might look something like this:

Portfolios

A

A-B

B

B-D-E

C

D

D-E

E