A bit of Crystal Reports 8.5 help

Hi all, first post!

I'm working for a company that runs a business management system which uses an old version of Crystal Reports (version 8.5!) for reporting on pretty much anything the system can output.

I don't know how much it differs from the newer versions, but i'm new to the system (two days experience and counting) and I'm after a couple of pointers.

1) I am trying to output stock levels for products which are both in and out of stock. Now, due to some sillyness when the BMS was designed, if a product is out of stock, it has doesn't have a row in the bins_lots table (where stock levels are kept), rather than 0.
Therefore, if I do a report which outputs the stock levels of a product (part, items that are out of stock are missing from the report, rather than having a 0 next to their name.
Is it possible to tell Crystal that if a product exists but doesn't have an entry in bins_lots (where stock amounts are kept) then it should be 0?
I'd find this easy if it were a normal If Statement, but Crystal has to be difficult with its wierd way of doing conditionals.

2) Secondly, again due to the BMS design, if a product is on order, the amount in the order is logged in multiple purchase orders. Producing a query will give me duplicate entries for products. I know I can 'hide duplicates', but it results in a messy report.
Can I make Crystal add all of these numbers together (i.e. where product = 'AD-03', add quantity of due products together) and output the final result without using the subtotal/group functions.

All help appreciated :)1) Left join to the bins_lots table. When the amount column is null then there's no stock.
e.g. a formula to return the stock level would be (assuming your column is called amount)
if isnull({bins_lots.amount}) then 0 else {bins_lots.amount}

2) Well, I don't really know how you're going to add numbers without grouping / total functions. Why is grouping an issue? Why can't you group on the product, hide the detail, and print in the product group footer to get 1 record per product? Nothing messy there.

60 days of backups

I have had a request to run backups of a database to disk, and retain the
backups until they are 60 days old. I've got the job set up, but it either
appends or overwrites the previous job. Does anyone know of a way to do
this?
TIA,
KSee
http://www.nigelrivett.net/BackupAllDatabases.html
You could use the sqlmaint exe but I think backups are too
important.
>--Original Message--
>I have had a request to run backups of a database to
disk, and retain the
>backups until they are 60 days old. I've got the job set
up, but it either
>appends or overwrites the previous job. Does anyone know
of a way to do
>this?
>TIA,
>K
>
>.
>|||Use the maintenance function in SLQ and enable the SQL server agent service
--
J
www.urbanvoyeur.com
"msnews.microsoft.com" <kb@.blah.com> wrote in message
news:uet5nU7iDHA.1696@.TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> I have had a request to run backups of a database to disk, and retain the
> backups until they are 60 days old. I've got the job set up, but it
either
> appends or overwrites the previous job. Does anyone know of a way to do
> this?
> TIA,
> K
>|||Thanks for the help...I setup a maintenance plan and have my fingers crossed
that this will work!
K
"UrbanVoyeur" <nospam@.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:ey9Bi4AjDHA.1676@.TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> Use the maintenance function in SLQ and enable the SQL server agent
service
> --
> J
> www.urbanvoyeur.com
>
> "msnews.microsoft.com" <kb@.blah.com> wrote in message
> news:uet5nU7iDHA.1696@.TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> > I have had a request to run backups of a database to disk, and retain
the
> > backups until they are 60 days old. I've got the job set up, but it
> either
> > appends or overwrites the previous job. Does anyone know of a way to do
> > this?
> >
> > TIA,
> > K
> >
> >
>