Friday, September 14, 2012

How to develop interactive reports (portal page) based on report view

Context
When building a complicated report, you want to maximize the usage by using report view. For the sake of explanation of this concept, assume that you have two parameters, region and Order method type. You want to deploy your report for each region, where region is predefined, or user must not give region parameter.  Certainly, you can deliver 5 different reports for 5 different regions. certainly, the smart idea is to develop an original report, then make report views for each region available.

You can download report specification for review. there are two filters in this sample; Region filter is used to generate 5 separated region view, business user won't see this filter at all in portal page. Order method type filter is the filter that can be specified by user on interface, or portal page.

Implementation in detail

Step 1 create the original report with two parameters, region and order method

Layout

Query with two parameters

When running this report directly, you need to input region as it is required parameter

Step 2 Create report view of original report for region Americas

Click more and then click create a report view


Change name as region Americas from report view

Then set properties as below
Specify parameter for region only and leave Prompt  for values NOT checked


Step 3  Run Americas report view



Notes:

This idea is very useful for portal page, as customized interfaces are provided for different kinds of business users. In this case, you can use a single report and produce many different reports (actually report views). The whole idea is to separate parameters as two kinds, the one set is preset behind the scene, while the other set is used for user input.


There are two tricks: 1) Keep Prompt for Values unchecked, as we don't want to show user parameters again. 2) specify all optional parameters with default value, otherwise, report consider filter not specified.

No comments:

Post a Comment