Filtering-Mulitiple Row Issues

[finaid01]

I am very new to Cognos, but I enjoy what I have learned thus far. I am working on a report that is giving me some difficulty. I am hoping that someone may have some suggestions.

Context: Financial Aid office does not want to pay a student until one of his or her classes has begun in a term.

I've pulled in the column for student id, name, term, course and course start date. Each course obviously has its own row. If I filter on course start date > today's date, it removes all of rows for courses that have started. Unfortunately, some students who remain also have courses that have already started. The basic filter is filtering specifically on the value of the course date row, not in its relation to the other course date rows for the specific student.

Any ideas how I can "link" the class rows to ID and then filter based on the first class date > todays date. Thanks in advance.

[raiff_cog]

Maybe you could create an additional field - let's call it class_started_indicator - that would be equal to one if class date is less than or equal to todays date, and else equal to zero.

Afterwards you should sum up this field for every student id, and then look for those that have result of this summing equal to zero for students that should not receive payment, or different from zero for students that should be payed.