Thanks for the responses so far...I guess I should have boiled my basic question down to this:

If someone walked up to you and said that Crystal Repoorts can do _any_ report on its own (with no preprocessing by Fox and no changing of the data model), and, in fact, can do things that Fox cannot, would you say they are:

a) Absolutely correct
b) They might think they are right but they must be doing something under the hood other than Crystal
c) they are just completely high.

As for the following:

>You didn't provide a complete description of your "end-date rules",
>but I have a feeling that your problem can be solved with SQL.
>It might involve a table of some sort that somehow contains your
>rules. It might also involve joining your tables in such a way
>as to produce a cursor where different events become different
>fields in one record, rather than different records.

It's not that I need to use different rules on the fly so that I need a dynamic list of them, and it's not a matter of denormalization either. It is a matter of needing to do a full scan of the data to see what the story is. We have rules like:

"If a 'Y' line is followed by an 'R' line (anywhere in the order of lines, not just directly followed) with no 'A' or 'B' line in between, then the 'R' line is NOT considered a close. In that case the close will be the next 'A','B',or 'C' line after the 'R' (unless of course an 'X' is encountered which means the whole thing is aborted and shouldn't even be included in the report)."

We may have a TREAT with two lines or a TREAT with 30 lines. The lines tell the whole story of a patients admission to the hospital, our approvals/denials of service, the patient's discharge, and the patient appeals (if any). Add in the ability to have aborts and technical denials, and I am hard pressed to see how any fixed set of SQL statements can come up with an accurate portayal of the lines and return to me a close date? I am well aware what nested SELECTs can help accomplish, but they don't seem to have a place here. Yes, a UDF() would work, but as was stated, that's not exactly SQL, and a UDF() that walks a database table isn't even possible in Crystal Reports, is it?

Thanks again for the discussion!

JoeK