Hi All,

I've got a pretty large project (annual financial statements) which was handled by another before me. The runtime of the reports I'm working with is crazy; it'll take hours(sometimes more) for a set of reports for a certain fund. It's a pain in the rear end in terms of proofing because when I try to change something I need to regenerate. From inception of the project (before my time), sharing variables was never thought of despite the crystals using the exact same underlying reports.

I'm considering biting the bullet and just redoing the reports to share. While I have the logic I need down, I had a few questions in terms of how to set up my groups and naming convention of shared variables. This is really my first large project using shared variables and any input would be greatly appreciated.

1. When you share variables, how do you set up your groups on different reports? Do you create a master group report which you use throughout the crystal? I was thinking that maybe groups don't even matter because the shared variable comes from another report and the variable derives its value from that grouping. Is this the correct line of thinking?

2. Because of the volume of shared variables, what do you recommend in terms of naming conventions? Currently I was doing "FinancialStatement""Name of Item". For instance, Organization cost on the statement of cash flows would be "CFOrgCost". If you all see any holes in this approach, please let me know.

Again, any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Brandon

Thanks for the response. That's what I was thinking; that you can't group by a shared variable. What I think i'm going to try and do is build a master report which contains the appropriate grouping information and drive in the shared data that way. Hopefully this works.

Thanks again,
Brandon