Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A

Trying to create a report in SPD from a SharePoint list where I want a row to be included in my nodeset IF field 'a' is null/blank AND a date field 'b' is less than a 'from' date entered by the user OR date field 'b' is between the 'from' date and a 'to' date entered by the user (as field 'a' could be non-null, but still want it included because of date being within from/to selection).

Does that make sense?

One of the problems is that the data is 157,000 rows in size and so far customer has not indicated that a look back can be limited by date, i.e., only look back so many months for selections to be included.

New to SharePoint/Designer - but reading about CAML, can a complex CAML query be constructed that could accomplish this?

That seems doable... With that many list items, you'll definitely want to stick with CAML. Think of CAML as your Select statement. The row iteration is what you are doing with the data from the server, so filtering within XSLT doesn't perform well on large lists.

If I'm not mistaken <DateRangeGroup> should be the CAML node to look at. Feel free to correct me on that.