Restricting duplicate results in grouped result set without using distinct - group-by

Question

I am attempting to create a query that returns a list of specific entity records without returning any duplicated entries from the entityID field. The query cannot use DISTINCT because the list is being passed to a reporting engine that doesn't understand result sets containing more than the entityID, and DISTINCT requires all the ORDER BY fields to be returned.
The result set cannot contain duplicate entityIDs because the reporting engine also cannot process a report for the same entity twice in the same run. I have found out the hard way that temporary tables aren't supported as well.
The entries need to be sorted in the query because the report engine only allows sorting on the entity_header level, and I need to sort based on the report.status. Thankfully the report engine honors the order in which you return the results.
The tables are as follows:
entity_header
=================================================
entityID(pk) Location active name
1 LOCATION1 0 name1
2 LOCATION1 0 name2
3 LOCATION2 0 name3
4 LOCATION3 0 name4
5 LOCATION2 1 name5
6 LOCATION2 0 name6
report
========================================================
startdate entityID(fk) status reportID(pk)
03-10-2013 1 running 1
03-12-2013 2 running 2
03-10-2013 1 stopped 3
03-10-2013 3 stopped 4
03-12-2013 4 running 5
03-10-2013 5 stopped 6
03-12-2013 6 running 7
Here is the query I've got so far, and it is almost what I need:
SELECT entity_header.entityID
FROM entity_header eh
INNER JOIN report r on r.entityID = eh.entityID
WHERE r.startdate between getdate()-7.5 and getdate()
AND eh.active = 0
AND eh.location in ('LOCATION1','LOCATION2')
AND r.status is not null
AND eh.name is not null
GROUP BY eh.entityID, r.status, eh.name
ORDER BY r.status, eh.name;
I would appreciate any advice this community can offer. I will do my best to provide any additional information required.

Answer 1

Here is a working sample that runs on ms SQL only.
I am using the rank() to count the number of times entityID appears in the results. Saved as list.
The list will contain an integer value of the number of times the entityID occurs.
Using where a.list = 1, filters the results.
Using ORDER BY a.ut, a.en, sorts the results. The ut and en are used to sort.
SELECT a.entityID FROM (
SELECT distinct TOP (100) PERCENT eh.entityID,
rank() over(PARTITION BY eh.entityID ORDER BY r.status, eh.name) as list,
r.status ut, eh.name en
FROM report AS r INNER JOIN entity_header as eh ON r.entityID = eh.entityID
WHERE (r.startdate BETWEEN GETDATE() - 7.5 AND GETDATE()) AND (eh.active = 0)
AND (eh.location IN ('LOCATION1', 'LOCATION2'))
ORDER BY r.status, eh.name
) AS a
where a.list = 1
ORDER BY a.ut, a.en