Hello to each and all.


I'm using Firebird 1.5 with Delphi 2005, and I have a little app that
deals with invoices. Not surprisingly, it contains a "monthly sales"
report that displays sums of invoices per month, on a given time
period. All is well, except I can't figure out how to display months
in the result set that contain no data.

So, for example if I want to return this year's sales per month, I'd
want the result set to look like this:

month amount
1/2005 0
2/2005 2000
3/2005 0
4/2005 5000
5/2005 0

... and so on. I get the data with a query like this:

select
(extract (month from invoicedate) || ''/'' || extract (year from
invoicedate)) as month, sum(topay) as amount
from invoice
where invoicedate between :startdate and :enddate
group by
extract (year from invoicedate), extract (month from invoicedate)
order by extract (year from invoicedate), extract (month from
invoicedate)

Works like a champ, except that if there are no invoices for a given
month, it will obviously not return a row, so the result set looks
like this:

month amount
2/2005 2000
4/2005 5000

... which is looks daft in a report and doesn't even answer the user's
question of "this years sales" accurately. I've been given a hint
that this could probably be done with a stored procedure, iterating
through the months and returning zeroes for months where no data
exists. Trouble is, I don't know how to do that, so any
hints/pointers would be greatly appreciated.


TIA,
Antti Kurenniemi