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About Report Sorted on a Multi-Value Field

Memory Sorting is employed when master records must be sorted by the contents of a multi-value field. An example of the situation is the Opportunities by Sales Rep report. You can view this report in the Opportunities screen by clicking Reports, and then selecting By Sales Rep.

Opportunity records are listed in this report, sorted by the sales representative responsible for working on each opportunity. If there were only one sales representative for each opportunity, this requirement could be satisfied with a sort specification and a group break. However, an opportunity record is assigned to a sales team, rather than a single sales representative. For you to see all the opportunities for each sales representative, the same opportunity must be listed under the name of each sales representative who is on that opportunity's sales team.

The relationship between an opportunity and the sales representatives assigned to it is a one-to-many relationship. In the Siebel business model, this is defined as a master-detail relationship (link) between the Opportunity and Position business components in the context of the Opportunity business object. The multi-value group displayed in Siebel Sales for opportunity records in the Sales Rep field is defined through the Position multi-value link.

For a report of this kind, the datastream must provide both the master and detail records. If only the opportunity records were sent to Actuate, it would be impossible to determine which sales reps were assigned to each opportunity; only the primary sales representative would be available for each opportunity. To send an interrelated set of opportunities and their detail sales representatives, the datastream must be defined in Siebel Tools with a report object definition for the Opportunity business component and a child subreport object definition for the Position business component. You can verify in Siebel Tools that this has been done for the Opportunities - By Sales Rep report.

Based on the master and detail records in the two datastreams, a set of merged records is created from the two business components that represents their cross-product, consisting of one merged opportunity record for each combination of an opportunity and a position in that opportunity's Sales Rep multi-value field. It is the merged records, created in memory, that are sorted into sales rep order and printed with sales rep sort breaks.

This report is analyzed in greater detail in Examining a Report Sorted on a Multi-Value Field (MVF).