Query Designer Issues

[saurabh.dubey]

1. when i open query designer and select some columns and click 'Done'. the generated query comes on query textarea present on 2nd step.
and then if I chnage my mind to add one more column and click query designer again then query textarea becomes empty and in query designer it doesnt show me the graphical structure of the tables which i selected previously.
So I have to start again from the beginning just to add one more column. Can something be done about this?

3. In expression tab can we have 'SUM' also? I want to sum up one of the column , but could not do so. In later steps we have facilty to SUM the numeric field but it doesnt work..may be I am doing something wrong but its not evident.
So I have to write SUM explicitly in the query manullay.
Tweaking sql manually can be a big turn off for the biggies of my company before whom I am proposing Pentaho reporting.

[mdamour]

So what you would like to do (not in SQL) is create a new column for "sum" for certain columns in each row... This definitely CAN be done without writing SQL, but it might not be super trivial. We have customers with this requirement and we added the column by writing an expression (or function) in jfreereport.

I'll get back to you on this. I know I wrote a simple API call that allows for this and I think I can demonstrate it rather easily.

-Mike

[mdamour]

Have you tried doing this with the Report Designer? You can add a field / calculation function fairly easily..

-Mike

[dbtx]

Did the original poster's #1 question ever get answered or addressed? (Regarding the visual display of the tables, and having to start over every time you need to make a change to your existing query.)

As someone coming from a Crystal Reports background (where you can go in and out of their visual query designer and not have to start over again each time), but now trying to utilize some open source products, this is a huge turn-off.

I'm using Pentaho Report Designer 1.2.0 build 219 that I just downloaded a few days ago.

Is this being addressed? I couldn't find any other posts on it.