Cool Idea for Simplifying Chart Expressions

I have an inventory reporting document that shows inventory quantities at the end of each month. The basic unit-of measure for inventory is “cases” but the material master table contains conversion factors for each product to convert quantities in cases into other units of measure like kilograms, pounds, pallets, or inventory cost in dollars.

Similar to what I’ve done in the past to help a user select date formats, or currency, or language; I set up a small inline table in the document loadscript that looks like this:

UOM_SELECTION:
Load * inline [
UOM_SELECTION, Abbrev, ConvFactor
Cases, CS, 1
Kilograms, KG, CONV1
Pounds, LB, CONV2
Pallets, PT, CONV3
US Dollars, USD, CONV4
];

In the document, the field UOM_SELECTION appears in a multibox and the user selects the unit of measure they want to see used in charts and calculations. The field is configured for “Always One Selected Value”. When the user has made a selection then the Abbrev or UOM_SELECTION fields can be used in titles or labels since there is only one possible value for those fields.

The ConvFactor field is interesting – it is not really a conversion factor in the little table, it is the field name of a field that appears in the material master. For example, each material in the material master has a CONV1 field whose value is the conversion factor to convert cases of that material to kilograms. In the chart expressions where the inventory quantity must be shown, the unit of measure is handled, not by a series of IF statements, but with the name of the conversion factor field. A typical expression would look like this:
Sum( cs_quantity * $(=ConvFactor) )

The ConvFactor is evaluated and the value, which is a field name, is used in the expression. In the inline table, the value of ConvFactor for cases is simply a 1 since no real conversion is necessary and multiplying by 1 works fine. You are not limited to a single field name in the inline table-- you could use something like CONV5/CONV6 or 1/CONV5 and it would be evaluated in the chart expression just like a single field name. The chart expression is faster and simpler without the IF statements that would otherwise be required to determine which unit-of-measure was selected.

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