The two most recent items (Business Objects)

This is going to be an easy one. Just a tip.

Let's assume, you want to know information for the two most recent pieces of data. Issue is, how do you get those most recent ones.

First, you need a measure -- based on a date.

Year([your_date]) this will get you the year, which is more than unique enough.
+Monthnumberinyear([your_date])/12

to the year, we add 1/12 of our month.

+daynumberinmonth([your_date])/31

and to that, we add 1/31 of the day.

The thing is, we don't want

15/March/2012

to be bigger than

1/April/2012

if we divide, we end up with numbers that stay in proportion.

An alternative, and probably an even better way to do this, is to multiply:

(Year([your_date])*10000) +    'that gives us 20120000
(Monthnumberinyear([your_date]) * 100)+   ' that gives us 201212
daynumberinmonth([your_date])  ' that should make 20121224

Interesting, it keeps the date readable. Which is always useful.



So, now we have our measure to base our ranking on -- now it's easy to get the two most recent ones isn't it.

Cheers.

Peter