Summary - Provide the capability to define expressions for the summaries

I can't believe that this has been asked 5 years ago and yet it has not been implemented. I don't use XtraReports much, but EVERYTIME I have to use it, I need to use Expressions for summary fields. This is a somewhat very basic requirement for a reporting engine. There seems to be a big disconnect between what us, developers need and what is emphasized by DevExpress team.

If someone like me that don't use reports very often have to resort to custom summary using at least 3 event handlers for EACH summary field, how can DevExpress propose XtraReports as ready for end-user design? It is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to find an end-user whith the expertise to write these calculations… I myself have trouble writing them inside Visual Studio!!!

Hi Felipe,
Thank you for your feedback. We do understand that this is a must-have feature.
I have just discussed this feature with our developers. We have plans to implement it in the future, but I cannot give you any promises or estimates right now. Once we have any results, we will update this ticket accordingly.
We appreciate your patience.

Ingvar, thanks for the response. Since I use XPO for all of my DevExpress based projects, whenever faced with a custom summary need, I prefer to add a calculated field on the Persistent Object. Most of the time I can use a PersistentAlias with an expression so that it can be used in server mode in scenarios other than reporting (which don't actually benefit from server mode). So, for example, if I had a FieldA and a FieldB, both useful as summary fields on their own, and if the Summary of their balance is also useful (Sum(FieldA - FieldB)) then I would introduce a calculated field like this:
[PersistentAlias("FieldA - FieldB")]
public T BalanceAB {
  get { (T)EvaluateAlias("BalanceAB");
}
But this would require a new deployment so that end-users could use it to design their own reports. The definitive solution is up to you guys. But it is nice to know you are working on it.

Hey Ingvar,
If you are getting your team to create this functionality, can you please get them to also allow these summaries to be individually filtered? So that in a single Report, that contains (for example apples and oranges) you could have summary columns at the bottom as:
Total Fruit | Total Apples | Total Oranges
I am aware that this same thing can be achieved using calculated fields but once your reports start to get complicated this becomes increasingly complex and messy.

This is one of the biggest reasons we're forced to continue legacy support for Crystal. If an end-user could easily perform calculations on summary totals and then filter on them, we'd be able to drop support for Crystal entirely.
Example:

1. Show a receivables report with customers who have a balance of multiple orders greater than $5 - each individual order cannot be evaluated, you must sum the balance and then evaluate that amount.
2. Wish to show a percentage total. You cannot simply perform the percentage calculation on each individual line, you must sum up the total of column 1 and the total of column 2 and then divine the totals to get a correct value.
   We can certainly leverage the scripting components of XtraReports to solve these problems, but this approach is well beyond the abilities of the end user.
   Help us ditch Crystal, please!

Thank you for your feedback! We will definitely take your comments into account when we have plans to introduce this feature. Please keep tracking this ticket to be informed of our results.

A must have for me as well. Simple gross profit percentage at the summary levels of reports are a nightmare.

We have developed a viable alternative for our own needs - summary fields. They are calculated fields that act as completely customizable running summaries, with full designer support.

Ìf this would support "gross profit percentage at the summary levels of reports": is that something you could share?

That is a possibility. I would have to separate it from seven other report designer overhauls and our core helper methods and repackage it.

Hi Joseph, community would certainly be interested in this feature, if indeed it easily supports "gross profit percentage at the summary levels of reports".

XtraReports is most dreadful experience I had regarding DevExpress.
What Felipe wrote is so true:
> There seems to be a big disconnect between what us, developers need and what is emphasized by DevExpress team.
I'm especially annoyed with response of type "we do not see scenario where this would be needed" which I stumbled upon several times now. What would my customer say when one requests for a feature and I would respond "Sorry, I don't see a scenario where your feature would make sense". Really?
Anyway, this ticket is yet another thing where XtraReports fails so miserably (and I simply have no time to create a ticket for every thing I find - and why should I - really important stuff like this one aren't solved for 5 years).
I mean, just look at the documentation: http://documentation.devexpress.com/#XtraReports/CustomDocument4817
Great example, so nice. Ok, now please give me example where you do this for 30 columns and summaries which are various combinations of summaries of those 30 columns. And now please do the same on next 30 reports.
And then, me as a customer will ask to change those summaries in 15 reports because I realized I need a different set of information.
That's how my day looks like.
I'll repeat yet again - guys, just take FastReport and rip all it's features shamelessly because they just nailed it. They know what features are really needed, they know what is most annoying for developers and they have no problem imagining various scenarios where various features might be useful.
I'm seriously considering to invest money and hire a developer that will find a way to use FastReports with XAF which is the only reason I'm still hurting myself on a daily basis with XtraReports which is a reason why I'm being so harsh.

I will say Mario isn't the only dev that feels the pain.

I have to add that customers using end-user designer are also complaining about this…

I fully share u feelings guys

I'd like to add that I've been waiting years for this feature as well. It is quite disappointing that the DevExpress reporting team can't identify common use cases for requested features, despite the fact that so many developers and End-User Designer users have been begging for this feature to be implemented.
The DevExpress reporting team has a history of taking change requests and providing replies such as "we don't see a need for this" or "nobody else has asked for this feature" and then closing the ticket. The problem with this approach is that, when you close the first request, the second request becomes the first request, which perpetually obscures the actual demand for new features.
Since this topic has had plenty of feedback from a number of different people lately, I would like to add my support (again) to the numerous people desperately wanting to see this feature in the product. I've been following this ticket for years and it's time that the DevExpress reporting team do something about it.

I have also been tracking this ticket for years, in the hope that there will one day be enough developers tracking that Devexpress will finally implement a solution. Maybe some harsh comments, and the possibility of losing customers is what they need.

Indeed, XtraReports team behaves like XtraReports Suite is it's own purpose. It's not. It doesn't have a purpose on it's own. It gets purpose when we, developers, find customers which have requirements which we solve using XtraReports.
But it's not just XtraReports, I've had this with XPO (especially) and XAF, but XAF guys did so much for me that I can forgive them just about anything :) (plus XAF is truly enormous, complex and versatile machinery so it's not even comparable to single-purpose suites like reporting or xpo)
I serve my customers and XtraReports should serve us. Obviously, in some reasonable limits just as I'm serving my customers in reasonable limits.
But saying "we don't see a need for this" is arrogant and insulting. OBVIOUSLY there is a need because someone requested it and there is absolutely no need that team understands it. As a product supplier, it's on team to implement those requests as best as they can and know. Just like I don't have to understand why my customer needs a report that shows certain data. I don't even care why he has a need for it. If he has a need, I have a job. I only need details how report needs to look like (or any other feature).
Of course, not everything can be done in reasonable time, but I don't see requests like that here regarding XtraReports. No one asks for impossible things, but things that are needed very very often, things that waste enormous amount of developers time, things that create frustrations - especially because one moved from product which had all those things implemented.
True, if you have bad architecture, some common stuff might be impossible, but that is not our problem. If you see that your architecture doesn't support common features, well then please go ahead and rewrite it. After all, most of features requested are years old.
DevExpress management should sit down and think about it a bit. Do you want a team and products that are their own purpose or do you want team and products that will serve customers that actually need that products (developers, to remind you)?
If it's the first then please say so, so I can stop wasting my time and my nerves and will simply switch to another product now when I still don't have thousands of reports to re-create.
Ok, I think I'm done for now. I'll continue after next 10 reports I create :)

Have to agree with the above comments.

Friends:
  Thank you for your feedback. I am clearly in the "serve customers" camp (as hopefully Mario can attest). If you ever feel like you are not being heard email me personally (sethj AT dx). I have a special folder in my email client (no not Trash) where I collect this kind of information. I am also available to chat personally with you about these things via a screen share. I *want* to know the pain points you experience with our reporting product so we can fix it. I speak personally to every dev team (under the Analytics umbrella) and ask for more transparent and concise usability (not necessarily for you but for your customers/users).
I would ask that you not dog-pile on our support folks given that they do not set schedules as to what will be implemented. They are really just trying to solve the exact problem in front of them.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Seth Juarez
Program Manager, Analytics

I'd like to add my support for the above comments. I purchased xtraReports as a replacement for Crystal Reports in my app, but even with Crystal being painful to publish reports to my users, it is still less of a pain that xtraReports. The lack of summary expressions feature is a major issue, but there are a bunch of other issues, such as parameters not affecting server side querying, difficulty providing portable reports and changing connection strings, serializing scripts, etc, that are stopping me from migrating my app to xtraReports. Every time I resolve another issue, I seem to hit another brick wall. It just doesn't work as an out of the box solution as a replacement for Crystal Reports, or similar reporting tools. 5 years seems a long time for a feature as critical as this to be still unimplemented.

Yes, Seth is a guy that comes with a white flag when I start crusade and usually absorbs the shots :)
But the problem is that XtraReports team seems to fail to recognize small but extremely important reported features.
Which is somewhat understanding because unless you actually create pile of endless combinations of reports, you can hardly now what is small but extremely valuable feature.
And ticket system spreads features too wide, so it's hard to find certain features and raise votes. And not all developers even look for tickets to vote for them.
One suggestion I could make is - create a feature page. One page, not thousands of unconnected tickets with various titles.
One page where we can submit features, one page to vote them all.
But even without a page, no ticket should be opened for 5 years. If a developer submitted a request for feature and two other developers confirmed it's important - I'd say that is good importance indicator. Why? Because I won't submit a feature unless I actually have a real need for it. I won't ask for ability to set Format on 20 cells at a time because I would think it would be a cool thing. No, I ask for it because manually setting format on thousands of cells is enormous time waste and frustration generator.
Same thing goes for "Hide Zeroes" and not to mention Summaries Expressions (actually, every Cell / Label should have ability to define expression, not just summaries).
Also, you need to stop thinking in terms "one report, three columns". Think "thousand reports, tens of thousands columns, tens of thousands summaries". And test every feature and every example you have through that point of view.
You will instantly see which features fails miserably.
Another cool thing would be ability to link documentation article with tickets and show linked tickets as comments to documentation article. But that doesn't belong here, I know.

I don't think people really intend to dogpile. We may not be aware of another outlet that is responsive to the collective need? Once we realize we're not alone our hopes and frustrations, we naturally want to share. Email doesn't have community awareness. I like the feature page/thread type idea. Though right now, I'm more interested in the report designer being a more rewarding tool.

Being relatively new to XtraReports, I subscribed to this ticket last week after spending 6-8 hours trying figure out how to do something relatively easily in an Access report. Admittedly, it was I did find out how to make custom summaries early in the process, but I thought for sure there would be an easier way to do it. Afterwards I spent 20 hours developing various reports where 90% of the time was spent implementing custom summaries. So while I haven't spent years waiting for this ticket to be solved, I have felt the need for something simpler, and I am currently cringing at the thought of creating more customized reports.

I’m another one fairly new to XtraReports although did have some exposure to a few years ago. We have a need to produce & train our customers on our own report designer to replace Crystal so I’ve just evaluated the demo and had a hunt around various support issues to see how the 2014 version compares…and after my experience before with it, I’m not surprised there is still bunch of shortcomings with this component.
In the absence of a forum, I’ll post here:
There seems to be a huge amount of Dev’s that would love to see the back of Crystal and yet I see XtraReports has not matured enough to even match a product as poor as Crystal. SSRS also has its detractors, particularly in the report writing area. The market is there for taking – Crystal has an ownership history with more holes in it than a collider, it’s an absolute pain in the a$$ to deploy, has a report server product which is a complete rip off and seemingly has a one-man support team.
My mandate for a report designer component is something I can put in front of a Financial Director, Traders and accountants and then after a few hours of showing them the ropes combined with their familiarity of MS Query/Crystal or SSRS, they can then create simple or complex reports that they did in Crystal.
When I used the Report Designer Demo, within minutes I found it lacking in functionality – I could only select 1 table! It needs to support multiple tables (S39293) and if the diagram control (AS15967) ever get implemented, allow users to setup the linkage. The params need to handle multi values as well (S91884), another long outstanding request. It would be nice to see some of the demo examples become selectable templates as well.
I’m also concerned about End users being exposed to terminology like TableAdapters- they don’t need to know or care about these things and I would really like to see all the property pages replaced with the new UI that you are using for Grid’s and other controls within Visual Studio. They look old and rushed- let’s see a nice Metro connection wizard please.
Also quite important is the need to import Crystal and SSRS (S90070, 7 years outstanding) - we have users with literally thousands of reports.
From my assessment, you cannot do complex banded reports with “Snap”, even though that seems to have a nicer connection wizard. But I think a mistake was made by DX here- they should have plugged the gaps in XtraReports functionality before embarking on Snap. As previously said: there’s a clear need for features like this – your competitors have already added these features, so they established the requirements some time ago. On seeing the comments here, I’m now expecting a big overhaul of the designer in the 2014 roadmap, it needs just work out of the box and be comparable to other components on the market.
There’s no way I can put this in front of an FD and I’m not going to get into patching up the designer with “easily broken at upgrade” helper classes either. It needs to be supported and work natively, we have enough trouble migrating between volume releases as it is.
It is not just the Reports team that use the “we don’t see a need for this” line – I see it across the board, I assume its been filtered down from management – highly infuriating.
Everyone needs to remember the aim of DevExpress – originally Developer Express. It's to take the crappy native controls and make them better and expand on them, make them so Dev’s can quickly pull a framework together. If that’s not happening at any point in this process then we’re failing in this mantra.
Aside from all of this, I’ve also frequently mentioned over the years, the need to see the most popular requests for each component and support center 2.0 has brought us no closer to it. Still not able to see where the votes are going.

I'm wondering if there is any progress on a solution to this issue.

Hi Nick,

We are still working on finding a solution that will work in all described scenarios. Once we have any results, we will post our resolution here.

We have solved this problem for over a year with a kind of calculated field we called a Summary Field. As a calculated field, it is perfectly chainable. It can operate in both immediate mode and cumulative mode. It can also reset at the start of any grouping, not just the most immediate grouping.
I would share, but I'd almost rather see DevExpress solve this problem in a whole new way.

I hope this functionality gets to be included in WPF

Need this.  @Joseph if you would be willing to share your solution it would bridge the gap for us until DevExpress can provide their own solution.  Also agree with @Brian (we have also worked with Crystal and SSRS etc), there is a market for the taking - Xtra Reports is a good start but has holes that need plugging in order to to be taken seriously.

Okay, okay. I cave. ;-)
https://github.com/jnm2/DevExpressMods
Let me know how it goes.

Thanks a lot Joseph.

Thanks Joseph!

If this were implemented it would make things a whole lot easier.

Would it be helpful if I provided a build? jnm2.DevExpressMods.dll?

Can you post a screen shot of what the new menu looks like?

Updated documentation at https://github.com/jnm2/DevExpressMods, including screenshots.

I find it disturbing that this much sought-after feature has not been implemented in 6 years. I talked my current company into using DevExpress as the reporting suite, but I'm starting to wonder if I have made a mistake. As developers we all understand that there are priorities, but 6 years of users being ignored is very poor.

This is why I haven’t pushed XtraReports in my company – I still see too many issues. Every year I reassess it, and whilst recently there was an improvement with a query builder in the end-user designer, I’m not comfortable enough it can replace Crystal. Granted Crystal is a mature product but DX have had the time to catch up. If I were to roll it out, users will compare it to Crystal and if it picks up a bad reputation and they revert back to Crystal, then that will stick forever – they will NEVER touch it again no matter what improvements are made. That is the fickle environment we work in. Can DX consider creating a web page with a feature comparison table against competitor solutions – and if they find any gaps then fill them!

I also need to have this feature implemented.

Hello to everyone who is tracking this ticket.

Thank you all for your feedback. I assure you that we have not abandoned this feature request. In fact, our developers are researching ways to implement this functionality in a user-friendly manner. We will keep you informed of any results.

I also need to have this feature implemented.

I would also appreciate this feature implementation.

Any update on this feature…all reporting suites provide this feature out of the box.

I have no news at the moment. We will inform you once this functionality is available.

Impossible to believe this still hasn't be solved.

Really frustrating. We still haven't been able to move off of Crystal because of this requirement.

It is really frustrating not to be able to meet a requirement because of a feature like this.

Looking forward to a solution for this too

I too would like this feature! and

I would realy need this!

I would really love to see this feature implemented also.

We would also need this! This is a must-have.

For those needing a workaround: I brought https://github.com/jnm2/DevExpressMods up to date with changes in DevExpress 15.2. In addition to that, the SummaryField has been slowly evolving in production use for over two years and is much more powerful than the initial version.

https://gitter.im/jnm2/DevExpressMods if you want to chat.

For the love of all the gods there are, will you implement this already?!?This is so important feature that your entire team should abandon EVERYTHING ELSE on XtraReports and implement this like the day before yesterday.
I have already moved to FastReports, but hundreds of XtraReports already created that needs updates are turning my days into nightmares.