Combination Sum

[SammyNed]

Hi  guys,

Can you please assist?

I have 2 tables, Table 1 basically shows how much Customer (Column: Y-ID) spent (Column: Spend) purchasing a certain number of products( Column: Orders) under different days (Column: X-ID) 

Table 2, shows all the items (Column: Item) that were purchased by a Customer and the Cost. Table 2 has already been filtered for a particular date (X-ID = 1) and Customer (Y-ID = A).

I would like to know if theres any way to show which combination of items were purchased under that particular cost. Table 3 below shows a sample of what i would like. So basically Item a2 and a5 were not part of the items making up the total of R100 spent.

Is it possible?

Thanks in advance

[Anonymous]

"So basically Item a2 and a5 were not part of the items making up the total of R100 spent."

WHY NOT? What's the algorithm that lets one determine which were and which were not participating in the cost?

[SammyNed]

Unfortunately there's no particular algorhim, just need to know which Items make up the total spend.  Can be random, sometimes all the items add up to the total spend and sometimes only a few items add up to the table spend.

[Anonymous]

You're out of luck here. To determine which items could constitute the whole (without any other constraints on the problem) you'd need to check all the possible combinations of items. This is not feasible and it's not the kind of problem that PBI has been created to solve.

[SammyNed]

Thank you for your feedback. At least now I can stop banging my head against the wall trying to figure something out. 😀