Some of you may have played with a technique that I have written about in the past. It is where you use a variable to create running totals within a cross-tab. These running total values can then be used within the cross-tab or even outside the cross-tab.

But I recently heard from a user who was having trouble whenever the cross-tab went over a page break. His variables would reset to zero on the new page and he thought it might be a bug in v10. So I did some testing and found that this behavior occurs in all versions, right up to CR 2008. Whenever a cross-tab goes over a page break it resets any variables it is using, even though the variable is global. The reset goes back to the value of the variable at the beginning of the split section. Usually this means a reset to zero. However in cases where the variable already has a value before the cross-tab section starts, it resets to that value.

There must be a bug or design flaw in the way the split pieces of a cross-tab are processed. Unfortunately, I could find no way to prevent the reset.

Thanks to Peter Lapic for pointing out this bug to me.