I am not even sure how to ask this but here goes..

We have an HTML form.

STEP1 - The user selects a time frame and data is retrieved for the entire company...ALL departments by department. This takes up to 2 minutes after which a message appears saying: 'Data Loaded'

STEP2 - The user then hits a 'Report' button that calls an HTML page where they may Multi- Select any combination of Departments. A report is run against the hold file created in Step1 for only those Departments chosen. Data is immediately returned. The user may repeat this over and over for any single department or combinations having data retrieval almost instantaneous since it lives in the hold file.

Its worked well for years.

Without getting into specifics we have a request that will cause one of the reported columns on the report to be calculated one way if ONLY 1 department is chosen and another way if more than one is chosen.

So, we need some sort of IF THEN ELSE logic in the fex that evaluates how may Departments the user has chosen on the html form.

(I am not making this up!)

Thoughts? I need a creative way to do this without recreating the thing from scratch - its rather involved.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FP Mod Chuck,

I guess the easiest ( and most certain ) way is to pre-query it.

TABLE FILE PRE_GENERATED_HOLD_FILE
 BY DEPARTMENT
ON TABLE HOLD DEPARTMENT_COUNTER
END
-RUN
-SET &NUMBER_OF_DEPARTMENTS = &LINES;

Then you can use &NUMBER_OF_DEPARTMENTS to switch between one and the other version of calculating your stuff ;-)

G'luck!

If, and only if, your parameter comes in as an "array", the number of items in the array is in the 0th element of the array.

An array arrives from a drilldown as:

&DEPARTMENT0=3;
&DEPARTMENT='Finance';
&DEPARTMENT2='Sales';
&DEPARTMENT3='Marketing';

Normally, if you define a parameter to be multi-select, it arrives as:

&DEPARTMENT='''Finance'' OR ''Sales'' OR ''Marketing''';

In a drilldown you can pass an array like this:[code]
TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=DEPARTMENT, FOCEXEC=nextFex(
DEPARTMENT='Finance'
DEPARTMENT='Sales'
DEPARTMENT='Marketing'
),$[\code]

You can use and populate arrays in loops, for example to create above drilldown dynamically:[code]
TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=DEPARTMENT, FOCEXEC=nextFex(
DEPARTMENT=&DEPARTMENT.QUOTEDSTRING
-REPEAT :NEXTDEP FOR &D FROM 2 TO &DEPARTMENT0;
DEPARTMENT=&DEPARTMENT.&D.QUOTEDSTRING
-:NEXTDEP
),$[\code]

Generally I would do things the way Dave suggested. Its fast and you know right away how many will return data.

If you needed to do this on the HTML side of things, you could write a function in JS to cycle through the values of the Multi-Select element and count how many are selected. You can then pass that as an input variable as well.

RobertF, is your fex receiving a var with value that would look something like this:

 
'Dept1' OR 'Dept2' OR 'Dept3'
 

Do you only need to distinguish between 1 value or many values? Or do you really need the count of the department values?

-DEFAULTH &Depts= '''DEPT1''';
-DEFAULTH &Depts= '''DEPT1'' OR ''DEPT2'' OR ''DEPT3'' OR ''DEPT4''';

-TYPE &Depts 

-* One or many logic:
-SET &Dept_many = IF POSITION(''' OR ''',&Depts) THEN 'Many' ELSE 'One';
-TYPE Dept_many = &Dept_many

-* Count of depts. logic
-SET &Depts2 = STRREP (&Depts.LENGTH, &Depts, 6, ''' OR ''', 5, ''' | ''', &Depts.LENGTH, A&Depts.LENGTH );
-SET &Depts2 = TRUNCATE(&Depts2);
-SET &Depts_count = &Depts.LENGTH - &Depts2.LENGTH + 1;
-TYPE Depts_count = &Depts_count

  

This message has been edited. Last edited by: dbeagan,

Got It...Thanks!