SYMPTOM:

You want your Report to be extracted conditionally, e.g., on the basis of some information that refers to a subset of all the employees of an Attendance Class. There are numerous places, where you can impose specific conditions. Depending on the specific requirements, you will find one or other of these options as more convenient to work with. This Article discusses the entire functionality related to these options.

RESOLUTION:

Here are the static ( or design-time) options

• Suppress Blank Value

You can instruct the System not to print values against fields, which are 'nil' (say, for specific employees). Even you may not wish to print values of String type fields, which are blank for specific employees. To instruct the System to do just that, select the field from the Report design, choose Edit/Properties, or press Ctrl+M. Then, mark the checkbox labelled Suppress Blank Value.

For example, consider a sample output as under:

Upon suppressing, the output will be as under:

• Suppress Printing

It is possible to implement conditional suppressing of text labels against fields of information. Let us assume that, in the design, there is a text field (label) like: 'Net Payable Salary', being placed beside the data field - Net Salary, acting as its label.

Suppose, you want to include all your employees under the Attendance Class, but you do not want to print the field caption (in this case: Net Payable Salary) if the value of data field happens to be nil.

To make the System suppress printing (or displaying) the caption when the corresponding data field is empty, select the text field and then chose Edit/Properties or press Ctrl+M. Then mark the checkbox labelled Suppress Printing. A drop down list of data fields captioned If Empty will be available, pick the desired data field (in this case: Net Salary). This feature is applicable for 'string' type fields as well.

For example, consider the above output to be as follows:

Upon suppressing, the output will be as under:

• Print for Condition

Create or open an existing Report design. Choose Edit / Page Layout or press Ctrl+P. The Page Layout window appears. You will observe that, towards the bottom of the window, there is a checkbox captioned 'Print for Condition'. You can specify a one-line condition like: Net Salary > 0.0

For example consider the above output as under:

If we take a conditional output, it will be as under:

Now, here are the dynamic (or run-time) options

• Choice of Attendance Class and periods

You can choose Attendance Classes and specify periods individually against which to extract Reports

• Option to Set (compound) Condition

Select the option button labelled Selective under the Option Group titled Set Condition. Suppose you want to extract Report considering only employees who do not work under a certain Department AND belong to a particular Pay Structure. You don't need to do anything with your Report design. Just select:

       DEPARTMENT != <department name>

AND  STRUCTURE == <pay structure name>

Here the <department name> stands for the literal department name and the list of all departments are available as a drop down list. The same holds for STRUCTURE too, and in this case it will only show a list of those pay structures that belong to the Attendance Class(es) tagged.

• Tag Condition

Suppose your company has 15 Departments and you want to extract the Report for 12 Departments. Select the option labelled Tag for a condition. A drop down list offers filtering categories, so you choose Department and consequently list of all Departments appear. By default, all Department appear checked. Turn off those against Departments you do not wish to consider.

• Consideration for Fresh employees and Retired/Terminated employees

You have four options that you can turn on as required, whether or not to consider:

1. Only employees who joined in the current Period of chosen Attendance Classes

2. Only employees who left in the current period

• Consideration Split case employees

We consider employees as falling under 'Split Case', if they have multiple Pay Structures effective within a single Pay Period. Consider the case of employees, who received mid-month promotions (however, Attendance related attributes are not changed). To effect the change in their wages, you can attach a second Pay Structure starting and being applied from some date in the middle of the month, say, on the 13th day of the Period. Such an employee will receive Salary at a particular Rate on a pro-rated basis for the first 12 days and at a different Rate, for the remaining days of the Period.  You can impose conditions to consider:

1. Only Split: Only split case employees with salary breakups that apply for these employees

2. With Split: Split case employees with salary breakups as well as other (non-split) employees

3. Default: All employees without any breakups. For split case employees when the same pay structure is re-attached, this will show the net figure for the head of pay, at end of period.

• Consideration for a subset of the period

It is not mandatory that you always need to consider entries for an entire Period. This is particularly important for TAS (Time Attendance System) related Reports. These Reports deal with attendance details for each and every day. It may not be necessary to view the data for the entire Period. Thus, for these Reports you have the option to extract information considering  a date-range indicated by a Start Date and an End date.

You can have multiple output formats also, which allow you to export information from your Report into numerous formats to be interpreted by other Applications. However, this Article discusses only the data filtering capabilities of PERKS. You will observe that a number of Run-time options are provided that help to minimise the System overhead and faster implementation.

MORE INFORMATION:

If you need preliminary assistance on how to create Report Designs, we advise you to refer to the Online Help, and make a search on  'Report Writer'.