Hiding nested row cells in crosstab - formatting help needed

[JGirl]

Assuming that I have a crosstab with 3 levels of row nesting (its more like 8, but for simplicity's sake we can pretend there are 3).  L1 is the highest level, and L3 is the lowest level.

I want to include 3 levels of nesting in the crosstab but hide the items for L1 and L2 (but keep the summary lines intact).  I'm building a statement style report from a ragged hierarchy, with uneven levels of nesting (eg.showing the children for some l3 but not others), in reverse order.  I can't think of a better way to build the crosstab apart from manually dragging in all the members I need, but I really dont want to do that as I want the report to be as dynamic as possible, and as I really have 8 levels, that would involve hard-coding about 50 members into the report.

I have some alignment issues due to trying to hide some of the row cells even though i've tried changing many properties.  Box Type = None messes up the column alignment.

The output currently looks like this, although not as exaggerated as my example below (ie. aligned correctly for the fact cells, but not for the row items)

--------------------
  | L3 Item   |  5 |
  | L3 Item   |  5 |
-------------------
| L2 Summary | 10 |
-------------------
  | L3 Item   |  5 |
  | L3 Item   | 10 |
-------------------
| L2 Summary | 15 |
--------------------
|L1 Summary   | 25 |
--------------------

I want the rows to be correctly aligned as below (as I need to show borders and use background colours on the summary cells)

------------------
| L3 Item    |  5 |
| L3 Item    |  5 |
-------------------
| L2 Summary | 10 |
-------------------
| L3 Item    |  5 |
| L3 Item    | 10 |
-------------------
| L2 Summary | 15 |
-------------------
| L1 Summary | 25 |
-------------------

So what I've tried so far to hide the cells:
* at a crosstab level I made the margin 0 (tried px and %)
* I unlocked the crosstab and cut the data items from the cells
* for each cell i want hidden i've set the padding on all sides to 0 (tried px and %)
* for each cell i want hidden i've set the width in size & overflow to 0 (tried px and %)
* set the font size in the cells to hide to 0
* set the borders on all sides to none

But I still can't get the left alignment correct.  It seems that there is a default property somewhere in the cells with a value that I need to change but I dont know what else to try.  For the moment, I want to try formatting-only options.  I'm not too keen to restructure my crosstab or query as it works well at present - except for the formatting.

Can anyone provide some magic?

[cognostechie]

My 2 cents..

I had a lot of problems aligning a Crosstab because I was formatting the column body. I unlocked and set the height and width of the data item on the columns and it aligned perfectly !

[CognosPaul]

Try this:

• Hide both the crosstab rows and the crosstab corner. Keep the rows visible by clicking on Visual Aids-->Show hidden objects
• Drag a crosstab space to the left of the leftmost column node.
• On each intersection of that new column set Define Contents to 'Yes'.
• Unlock the report and drag the data item into the cell.
• Set the cell to align left, put a label into the column header, and try running it.

The problem with this technique is that it doesn't allow for grouping. Everything will appear as a list. The benefit of this is you can put the labels wherever you want in the CT.