Report Templates¶

Configuration ‣ Reports and Dashboards ‣ Templates allows you to create, edit and delete report templates. These templates can be used to generate reports throughout NEXUS IC.

Report templates (once configured), can be given a Status and a Category. Additional report categories can be configured (see Report Categories).

You can mark a particular report template as a Dashboard report: edit the template and tick the Dashboard Report box. That template will then be available when users visit the DASHBOARDS area. If you tick Dashboard Report, Section Heading, Multimedia Thumbnails and Table of Contents types will be marked with a anomalous to indicate that these elements will not be displayed in a Dashboard template.

Similarly with Asset Dashboard: set a template as your Dashboard report by right-clicking it and choosing Asset Dashboard or by selecting it and clicking the Asset Dashboard button, and each time you visit an asset on the Assets screen with the Dashboard tab visible, your selected dashboard template will be executed. (You should ensure that the template you use does not take long to execute — if it does, you will be waiting every time you change asset with the Dashboard tab visible.) (In order for a Dashboard report to reflect the selected asset in the asset hierarchy, it needs to have Simple Source in it which retrieves VN_ID from a User Input Parameter.)

General strategy¶

In your final report template, you want to present user-visible things like headings, text, tables, drawings, etc. To power these, you will need Simple Sources to query data from the database. To power any custom columns in the sources, you will need functions.

NEXUS IC’s design lets you create these things in whatever order is convenient to you: you can create all your functions first, then your sources, then the user-visible elements; or you can rough out your report in an empty state by starting with the user-visible elements, and then go on to create the Simple Sources that underly them, and then create the functions needed for those sources. And it’s usually easier to work in this latter way: create your report from the top down.

Add/Edit¶

To add a new report template, click Add. You’ll have to give your new report a name, and we strongly recommend you give it a category.

To edit an existing one, select it and click Edit, or just double-click it.

In both cases, you’ll be taken to the same dialog.

Report Template dialog¶

At the top of the dialog, you’ll see Name, Status, Category and Comments.

At the left of the dialog, you’ll see a view of available elements. This is broken into two parts: Sources contains the things you can get data from, and Elements contains all the things that you can display in the report. Most elements need a source to get data from. A single source can give data to more than one element.

At the right, you’ll see the Report Layout tree showing all the elements currently in the report.

Take a look at some existing templates and you’ll see how they’re put together.

Often the simplest kind of report you’ll want to design contains a single table, displaying data from a single source. To create a report like this, drag a Simple Source from ‘Available Elements’ at left onto the ‘Report Layout’ element at right, and drag a Table of Data (or a Vertical Table or a Pivot Table) from ‘Available Elements’ to ‘Report Layout’. (In general, you can drag elements onto the root ‘Report Layout’ element, in which case they will appear at the bottom of your report; or drag them onto another element, in which case they will appear just above that element.)