One of my students presented me with the following challenge. Their address records were stored in a table that keeps an address history. That means that new addresses don’t replace the old addresses. Each new address is a new record with a time stamp. The current address is the record for that customer that has the latest timestamp.

To display the current address for each customer is fairly easy and can be done in one of two ways:

1) Group by Customer and sort by time stamp. Hide the details and place the address fields in the Group Footer. This would display the last address for each Customer.

2) Group by Customer and put in a group selection formula that says:

{Address.TimeStamp} = maximum ( {Address.TimeStamp} , {Address.CustomerID} )

Either of these will work to show the current address for each customer. But if you want to select only current addresses in a particular state, like NY, you have to be careful. If you put the State criteria in the record select expert or record selection formula the criteria will be applied before the grouping happens. Crystal will start by selecting only New York records regardless of how old the timestamp is. Then it will do the grouping and show the last NY record in each group. You would end up with the last New York address for each customer, rather than getting the accounts that have New York in their last record.  Anyone who had moved of NY to somewhere else would still show up.

My original solution involved a formula that combined the Date and the State into a single string field. Then I used a complicated group selection formula to find the right records. You can read about it here and it works fine.

But today I realized there is a simpler approach. The key is putting the State rule into the group selection formula, so it is applied after the grouping is done. So your Group Selection would look like this:

{Address.TimeStamp} = maximum ( {Address.TimeStamp} , {Address.CustomerID} )
and {Address.State} = "NY"

As long as the last line stays in the group selection formula this will return the desired records.