The relative data group type is one of the collection of data manipulation types: filter, group, merged, pivot and relative.

A relative data group is used to create a new data group out of the internal content of its parent data group. This is a specialised data group type that requires a knowledge of the internal structure of a data group and of the xPath query language.

Most data groups’ internal structure is of a simple collection of elements each of which represents a row in the data. Each row’s element contains attributes and/or sub-elements that contains the field values.

However, some data groups hold data in a more complex structure, sometimes containing sub-elements that themselves contains sets of rows. A relative data group can be used to point at such a container and select the data rows within it.

There are two settings:

xPath

An xPath query relative to the parent data group’s data container element that locates the element that contains the new data group’s data rows.

Filter

An xPath query relative to the xPath query’s location (above) that filter the elements representing the data group’s rows.