Grouping records in a document

Grouping records together helps people who read the document to understand the data better. Grouping the data sets up a type of hierarchy within the document, and an inherent or implied sort order for the data. The data is first sorted by the leftmost field in the Grouping panel, then by the next field, and so on. To reorder the grouping, you can move the fields in the Grouping panel.

In the following example, the Sales by Region dataset has Region, Year, Category, and Subcategory attributes, and it has the Units Sold and Revenue metrics in it. This is shown below as it appears in the Dataset Objects panel of the Document Editor.

If you drag and drop all the dataset objects to the document's Layout area in the order they appear, and add headings to label the controls, the document looks like the following:

If you want the document to be grouped first by Region, and then by Year within Region, first ensure that the Grouping panel is displayed. Then drag Region from the Dataset Objects panel onto the Grouping panel. Next, drag and drop Year onto the Grouping panel.

With these changes, the document groups first by Region, and then by Year, as shown in the following image:

The ascending sort order of both Region and Year comes from the default sort order of these attributes. You can change the sort order. For steps, see Sorting records in a document.

For more information on the default sort of attributes, see the Advanced Reporting Guide.

You can select attributes, consolidations, and custom groups as grouping fields.

You can select which grouping fields to sort, the sorting criteria (what to sort by), and the sorting order (ascending or descending). Any object in the Grouping panel can be sorted. For steps, see Sorting records in a document.

When a user views a grouped document, drop-down lists are displayed to allow the user to select which elements, or subsets of data, to display. You can select which attribute forms are displayed in the list, and the order of the forms, as described in Displaying forms in a group.

Grouping and PDF bookmarks and table of contents

Each element of each grouping field automatically becomes a bookmark in the PDF. You can disable automatic generation of bookmarks. For steps, see Including or hiding bookmarks in PDFs.

If you choose to include a table of contents in the PDF, each element of each grouping field is listed as an entry in the table of contents.

Grouping and multi-layout documents

You group each layout of a multi-layout document independently of other layouts. By default, a user's grouping selections apply only to the current layout. You can specify that the grouping selection is retained when a user switches layouts in MicroStrategy Web, if the new layout contains the same grouping field as the original layout. For instructions to retain the grouping selection, see Applying grouping selections to the current layout or all layouts. For more information on multi-layout documents, including which settings apply to the document as a whole or to individual layouts, see Creating multi-layout documents.

Grouping and page-by

By default, page-by is enabled for all the grouping fields in the document. Page-by is the ability to select grouping elements for display when the document is viewed as a PDF or in HTML. For more information, see Using page-by on a document.