Question

I am trying to write a Business Object report to show a list of the people who have not returned a timesheet on a selected date, but I can’t figure out how to stop the SQL query returning multiple entries for individuals.

My Staff_Table contains 2 columns – Employee No & Name
My Timesheet_Table contains, among other things, Employee No & Week_Ending_Date.

I can easily write a statement to return all users who have entered a timesheet with a Week_Ending_Date of e.g. 10/08/2012. However, if I try to return a list of all those who have not enetered a timesheet for 10/08/2012, I pick up every single timesheet in the table which does not have that date, so, for example, if a person has submitted 100 timesheets and only 1 of them is for 10/08/2012, the results will show him 99 times.
What I need is a fixed list of everyone on the Staff_Table who has not submitted for that date, showing once only.

I tried a Union with NOT EXISTS but either I’m doing it wrong or it simply isn’t appropriate.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Try adding DISTINCT to your query

ie

SELECT DISTINCT ...

Your query should look something like

SELECT * 
FROM Staff
WHERE NOT EXISTS 
(
    Select EmployeeNo 
    from Timesheet 
    where WeekEndingDate='2012-08-10'     
    and TimeSheet.EmployeeNo  = Staff.EmployeeNo 
)

or

SELECT * 
FROM Staff
WHERE EmployeeNo NOT IN 
(
    Select EmployeeNo 
    from Timesheet 
    where WeekEndingDate='2012-08-10'
)