FastTrac: Add Question/Answer Records to a Report
3.1 - Migration Training Video
Table of Contents
Introduction:
Join Brian Hatch as he reviews how to add a Question / Answer record to a custom report within RecTrac 3.1
Video:
Transcription:
Brian Hatch 0:02
In this video, we're going to walk through the topic of adding question records to reports. In many cases, you're asking questions during the reservation or reservation process. And those questions can be helpful on different reports. So to add question records to a report, you can go to report output management from the menu... you can then find your output record. So I'm going to filter down to my reservation reports, for facility. And I'll use my default Facility Reservation report for this example. So by default, it has a lot of the details associated with the reservation, but the question records are not included in the output. So to do that, and to add that piece, and I'm gonna go ahead and choose clone at the bottom. And I can give it a new report output name. So I'm just gonna say with the question records on the end of that, and I've just dropped the VSI in the beginning prior, so Facility Reservation report with the question records. And I'll go ahead and hit Save. And now that I have my new output record, I can customize it by clicking on Update output on the right hand side.
So on the right hand side, you can see the different fields that currently have printing up on this report from what I've cloned from. And if I want to add more values to this, I'm just going to add a row two here by clicking on rows at the top. And just going to select insert at end... now that I have a row two, I can add in some question record details. So from the SA detail table, I can just Type in the filter question. And that will filter down to the different question records that are available. And there's kind of two ways we can approach adding questions to reports. One is kind of the simple easy way would be just question answer all. When you choose this option, you Click and drag it over to row two. And it doesn't really matter where in row two. But if you Click and drag it over and release, it's going to automatically take up the full row of row two. And what this Field is going to do is it's going to take any of the questions that are involved in the record. And it will try to print those off on the report. So as an example, I'm just going to go ahead and hit Save Changes in the bottom left. And then I'm going to open up my reservation report Screen.
And it's going to go and run this report for a reservation that I know I have on the books for today for this one facility, and the bottom left, because I had saved before opening this report Screen, I now have my new output record that I just created. So I'm gonna go ahead and select that, make sure it's on detail. And I'm just going to run this as a test. And I'm going to run a poll PDF and CSV so I can illustrate what this looks like. Okay, so the PDF, you can see how that displays. So ultimately, if you're looking for a PDF solution, that's a really easy Field to add. And it's going to give you those question records listed, like you see here on the left. And if you're looking for an Excel solution, I got an open this up. This might not be the best solution if you're planning on using this data in Excel. One thing you'll notice is the we combine all the different question records into one Field when we go with this solution. So while the data is there, it's not easy to read and it's not something you can kind of easily filter with. So depending on your use PDF or CSV, it might determine how you set up your report record. But I'll show you an alternative to that option. So if I go back to report output update, so I left that open earlier and if I remove question answer all so I'm just going to Click and drag that into the left hand box and release it when it turns red. So an alternative solution is adding in individual question answer records. So Question Answer one, for example, I Click and add that into really any Field in row two. In my example, I can then Click on the pencil editor for that Field. And I can select an individual question record. So if I'm looking for one of my questions is Field size. So I just want that one individual question because it might be really helpful. For my staff, when I run them the report, I can actually choose to include a label or not include a label, I'm actually going to leave that off, the label is actually going to be included in my question record here. So I'm just gonna go and hit save. I also think that that might be a small box in the PDF scenario, or it might not fit in the full answer. So I'm just going to Click and drag from the right hand part of that cell all the way over. I'm just going to create a couple all the way over to see and we'll choose the merge option at the top. It's not going to fall area where my question record answer will display. And we're gonna go ahead and hit save changes on the Screen. And if I go back to my Facility Reservation report, and I go to process this again, cannot choose both PDF and CSV to illustrate the output.
So that you can see in the PDF on the left hand side, it actually just put in the answer itself. So whether I want just the answer, or I want to have the label of Field size in front of it, I'd be something I can determine, and I can go back and adjust. Depending on the scenario, one way might make more sense than another. But if I open up Excel, I can only have one question record listed here, but it actually isn't its own column. So this is where it might be much more beneficial to break out the question records into separate fields on your output, because you'll be able to filter those down by column in Excel. So I added in one question record, but you'd really repeat that process for whatever question records, again, you feel are helpful to include on your report. So I did question answer one and I actually filled in the question record itself. I could at this point, fill in question two. Question three. basically go through and add as many different question records as I need to that are involved. And you have to remember to do the step of clicking on the editor option and then choosing the question record that you want to display in that Field. So it's a little bit of extra setup step. But it might be worth it depending on you know, if you want that XML formatting to be a little bit more useful, so two different ways you can add question records to a report output and RecTrac