Combine many rows into one

There’s a hidden gem in NetSuite called NS_CONCAT. It can easily summarize and concatenate rows within a Saved Search.

Let’s say you wanted to display a single record for each Sales Order along with the contents of that order. Below is the search criteria and results displaying 6 Sales Orders spread across 16 rows. Sometimes this is the desired result. On our case, we needed to shrink the results.

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Now for the magic!

Start by adding some groups to collapse the data. Next, you’ll want to add a Formula (Text) field with a summary type of Minimum. Set the formula value to: NS_CONCAT(TO_CHAR({item.internalid}))

Keep in mind you can substitute the {item.internalid} field to any field you want. In our case, we needed to also use TO_CHAR to convert the integer to string.

RESULTS!

Notice there’s only 6 rows now! Each of the product ids were combined into a single row, separated by commas.

I believe you can also use the NS_CONCAT function within SuiteScript; however, I have not tried that yet.