Sort Data and Display Top Rows

Built-in Data Sorting Mechanisms

Among the main benefits of a pivot report is its ability to provide summarized data against matching values instead of viewing each and every record in which the corresponding value appears. The DXPivotGrid always sorts values in its axes. It does this to merge matching values into a single value. Thus, you get a single entry for the same trademark, model, date, person or whatever information you are analyzing.

By default, the values in the row and column axes are sorted in ascending order. If values are displayed hierachically, the values in the child groups are also sorted.

End-users can sort data by clicking the desired field header. This feature makes it much easier for end-users to find the desired information.

Sort Values Manually

By default, field values are sorted in alphabetical order (for text based data) and in order of magnitude (for numeric and date/time data). You are not, however, limited to this sorting logic and can choose one of three additional sorting modes: by values (default), display text, or using a custom sorting algorithm.

Sorting by Summary Values

With sorted values, end-users can navigate through reports much more easily and find the entries they are interested in. But often the reverse is required, instead of searching say for how many sales there have been of BMWs, end-users may instead wish to find the brand which has sold the most or least. Instead of searching for how many goals a particular player has scored, they may wish to find the player with the lowest or highest goal count.

The DXPivotGrid lets you easily solve such reverse data analysis tasks because each field can be sorted by the corresponding grand total values instead of its own values. All you need to do to make this happen is to specify the field whose summaries should be used for sorting. End-users can do the same at runtime, by using value header context menus.

Top or Bottom Numbers Report

The DXPivotGrid provides yet another feature that can greatly enhance your reports. If end-users are not interested in browsing the entire report but only need to investigate the best or worst results, you can suppress any surplus information. To do this, you can specify the number of results that are displayed for each field. Thus, end-users will see the specified number of best results if a field is sorted in descending order. Switching the sort order will result in displaying the same number of worst results.