Overview

Understanding how Range List regions work is a foundational concept for building reports with Cosmos. Range Lists are dynamic ways to create lists of information going down rows or across columns, for example, and the user has full control over what is copied along with each value that is returned by the Range List. 

This article will cover the details of how Range List regions work and how to leverage them to create powerful reports.

Details

Range Lists enable users to create dynamic lists of information going down rows or across columns. When creating a Range List, the user can define the region that they want to copy for every value that the Range List returns. 

For example, if the user is creating a list of customer numbers, and they have additional details that they want to have copied down for every customer in the report, the user would include these cells within the region of the Range List. Here is an example of a Range List where, for every customer number returned in cell A1, it will copy down everything that exists in cells A1 to G6.

In addition to the customer number, any Cosmos functions, Excel functions, and formatting will be copied in the report as well. This is similar behavior to the user manually copying the cells in Excel and pasting them further down in the report. 

The result of the above example being run would look like this:

It is also possible to create nested lists of functions within each other for more robust grouping reports. Nested Range Lists are covered in detail in the article here:

How to Nest Range Lists to Create Grouping Reports

As an example of text being copied down for every customer, the text "This is a test" was entered across columns in the original report and run. The example below shows the results, highlighting that everything within the Range List region is copied for each value (e.g. customer number) that is returned.