Table of Contents
Join Brian Hatch as he walks through how to customize reports in RecTrac 3.1
Report Customization Part 1
Summary
In part 1, Brian demonstrates how to clone a report output to use as a jumping-off point for your custom report.
Video
Transcript
Welcome to the 3.1 Customizing reports migration video. In this video, we will walk you through the basics of customizing reports. 3.1 comes with a robust number of reporting outputs, and hopefully those will meet most of your needs. But in cases where they don't customizations the answer, the migration is a good time to review your reporting needs with your staff to see if consolidation of reports is possible. For example, if 10 Different roster versions are currently being used by your staff, and there's only one or two differences between many of them, combining those into fewer outputs might be a good solution. To customize reports, we're going to launch the menu on the top left, and I'm just going to Type in output. And we're going to go to report output management. This will give you a full listing of outputs in the database. I'm going to expand the grouping for rosters, we'll use a roster as our example. And you can kind of Click down through and find the roster version that kind of closely mimics what you're really looking for. So I'm going to use our standard activity roster output. And in our example, we'll remove a Field add a Field and make a couple other adjustments to the current output. So step one is to clone. So we can't change a VSI output. We have to clone it as a first step. So we'll just call this now our activity Roster report, drop the VSI. And for now, I'm just going to hit save. So we now have our new report output record. And now we can get into the actual updating that record and making the customization changes. And we'll do that in the next video.
Report Customization Part 2
Summary
In part 2, Brian demonstrates how to navigate the report customization screen to add and remove fields to a custom report output.
Video
Transcript
Okay, so to customize the report output, we've already created our own custom one here, from an activity roster, we just cloned from the activity roster output. And now at the bottom, you have the ability to update output. So I'll Click on that now, that'll open up our report writing Screen. And the Screen itself breaks down into several different areas. So on the left hand panel, we have the available tables, listing for that. So the different tables I can pull information from, and depending on the table selection, the available fields below there. So SAdetail being kind of at the transactional table, so anything to do with, you know, enrollment, date, fees, enrollment user, those types of things are all going to be pulled from SADetail, as in other popular tables would be SAHousehold for household information for address, phone numbers, things like that. And you know, SAPerson, for personal information, so birthdays, names and other things, I'm not level. So it really just depends on what fields you're looking to add as to what table you're looking to pull up from. So the available fields are at the bottom, and the starred ones are kind of the commonly used fields. And you can use the filter at the top to kind of Type in a keyword to hopefully find what you're looking for. So enrollment date, for example, I can now see that in the list, and I could kind of add that to my report. On the right hand side is kind of the report as it is right now. So I have the different columns for what's currently on this output. So in my case is name, age, gender, phone, email, and enrollment status. So we're going to start with just a couple of kind of simple edits. So enrollment status, it's just decided I don't need that Field, I can Click and drag holding down my mouse, I can drag it over to the left hand panel. And you'll notice there's kind of a red highlight border on that. And I can kind of drop it there. So that's how I can remove individual fields. So let's just remove two different ones here, clicking and dragging them to the left. And now I have the ability to kind of do the reverse and add in fields. So the enrollment date, that really was a piece of helpful information, I can Click and drag it, you notice it turns kind of green, I can release it. And now that Field is added in. And I'm going to switch my table in the top left to SAHousehold. That will update the fields below. And I can now add in a SAHousehold Field. So if I wanted to add in address, I can Click and drag that over to my Available Field. Now that's a Field that's available. In addition, I can add in additional columns and rows. So if the default number of columns wasn't enough for the amount of data I needed to add, I can Click on rows at the top and insert at the end. And you'll just have a new row to add additional data. And you can move fields around within the record to rearrange them as needed. And I will just add in two different fields, you can adjust the column widths just by clicking and dragging on the header border, you want to be if you're doing this for PDF, you just want to be aware of the width, you don't really want to go over 100% as it will run off your PDF page. In addition of extending columns, you can also extend fields or merge fields. So I can Click on a Field and then drag the border. And when I hit the Merge Button at the top, it just extends that one Field across the multiple columns, allowing for some flexibility there as well. And when I'm done making the different types of edits, on the bottom left, you have the ability to switch to the other version of this output the summary versus the detail. Or this point, I'm just going to hit Save to save the output record. And that's an example of customizing report, I'd be able to now go to the enrollment report Screen. And when I launch it, I would have the ability to see my new output listed in the bottom left hand output listing. So if I Click on that pull down, I have all my VSI standard outputs. And now I have my new custom output available as well. And we'll get into another example. of customization here in the next video
Report Customization Part 3
Summary
In part 3, Brian demonstrates how to add and use placeholder fields to allow some flexibility while running a custom report output.
Video
Transcript
So let's walk through another common report customization. And I'll continue to use my activity roster output that we created in the earlier steps. So update that output by using the update output Button. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add in another row. Again, you can add as many rows of data that you need. So another row of fields are available to populate. And one of the options we have is called a placeholder Field. So in the table listing, if I was to choose default widgets as my table, one of the fields that's available is the placeholder Field. So what this Field does is allows you to kind of block off a Field for kind of customization on the fly for your end users when they go to run the report. So can I closely mimic what they would have been able to do in 10.3. And you can add as many placeholder fields as you'd like. So it's the same concept, you Click and drag. So if I want them to be able to add fields on the fly, just add in, I fill out the open fields with placeholders. They don't have to use them, but they gives them the ability to add, and this case, several different placeholder fields. So just by me adding these fields in here, if I was to hit save, what does that really mean? At this point, if I go back to run my report, which I still have it open at the top my activity enrollment report. And I already created the output earlier. But now that I've added specific placeholder fields to that report, I can select whatever programs I want to use to run it, I've got one program selected on the left, I'm just going to hit process in the bottom right. And then one difference here in this whole process is there's now a placeholder Selection tab on this pop up box. Again, that's just because the report recognize these new fields, these placeholder fields, and you can see that it doesn't say placeholder says add fields. So these are where I put those fields in the report writer Screen. At this point, you have the ability to add in, or the person running the report has the ability to add in whatever fields they need so for an example, if they needed certain date fields, and this is a searchable list. So you can kind of say at this point, I do need gender, I could Type in the word gender, there's several different genders, hopefully, the the one star is the gender of the person enrolled. So as a person is the table you typically on a pole for information regarding the enrollee. But again, you could search through as many fields as you need to again, very closely mimicking what you would have been able to do in 10.3 on the fly. So at this point, I make add in whatever Field I need to add in. Under additional settings, I can kind of bounce back. At that point, I can print preview email, just like I would with with any standard report. So that can add some flexibility to your report outputs and potentially cut down on the number of custom outputs you need to make, again, kind of determining how many do your staff need? Or how many do your staff run right now different versions of your roster report, you might want to gather those together, see what the differences are. Again, an example or I've seen it before, there's 10 Different rosters on my table right now that I'm just checking to see what the differences are. And there's only a couple of key differences between let's say 50% of them or 80% of them, we might want to look at just kind of consolidating those pieces, different pieces of information and creating kind of a one custom output or a couple of custom outputs that meet most of their needs. And then above and beyond that we could again create additional outputs or we could maybe meet their needs with the placeholder logic. So just another example of ways to customize reports in 3.1