Reports in Supportworks are organised arrangements of largely management information whose value elements are obtained from the records of appropriate tables in the Supportworks database. Supportworks has facilities by which you can display and print individual reports from the ready-made selection supplied. Supportworks will also allow you to construct your own reports, either by modifying the configuration of existing ones or by building completely new ones. With reports that fall under the category of “System Reports”, such customisation is made easy by the use of a wizard. However, if you have been supplied with any reports of the type “Custom HTML Reports”, and you wish to modify them, you will need to be familiar with PHP and HTML.
A System Report can be either fixed or interactive. When run, an interactive report presents the user with one or more data fields in which they can enter information that will suitably filter the database records being queried. A report can be interactive in two ways. Firstly, it may display configurable prompts to which the user must respond before it generates its actual output. Secondly, the report may display, above each output column, an SQL filter field into which the user can optionally enter criteria relating to the column concerned.
Users can run System Reports in real time, and they can also schedule them to run at a single specified time, or regularly at specified intervals. Only fixed-data reports can be scheduled.
Reports may be statistical in nature, or they may display a formatted list of database records. Typically, a statistical System Report will be call-related, giving the current number of open (or closed) calls grouped by support analyst, support group, customer, department (charge centre), site or SLA. The calls may, for example, be measured against call status, SLA or support analyst, or the report may be subject to a time-period constraint. A System Report containing a record list will typically obtain its data from the table of customers, assets, charge centres, manufacturers, sites and/or suppliers. The full list may be
concerned. Thus, customers could be listed by department, or the list could contain only customers within a specified department.
In a statistical System Report, results can be displayed in the form of a chart, and also as textual information. A list System Report may also be headed by a chart, but this is less common. With both types of report, each separate grouping of textual information may include a further, subsidiary chart that is simply a group-level version of the main chart. You can modify the characteristics of each chart in a given System Report by means of the Chart Constructor. Using this tool, you can set various chart dimensions, specify the chart type, change the chart’s background colour, and so on.
Textual information, such as a list of records, is generally presented in tabular form on the report output, reflecting the database table columns from which the values will have been taken. The headings of the displayed columns are always derived from the respective Display Name attributes of the table columns concerned, and are therefore data-dictionary dependent. See the chapter on the Supportworks database in the System Customisation Guide if you want to know how to modify the display names.
Each System Report is based on a PHP-scripted template defining its overall type, while its specific characteristics are determined by its configuration, which is stored in the database. It is possible to share System Reports among different Supportworks systems by saving their configurations in a file on one system using an export function, and then restoring these from the file on another system by means of an import function.
If you have any Custom HTML Reports, their role would be to meet those of your organisation’s more complex reporting requirements that System Reports are unable to fulfil. Although Custom HTML Reports have the advantage that they support multi-querying and multi-table value counting (which System Reports currently do not), there are no easy-to-use customisation facilities available for them, it is not possible to schedule them, and they have no configuration that can be shared.
1. Display the Management Information and Reporting view by clicking the relevant icon in the shortcut bar.
2. In the tree-browser pane, choose the appropriate information or reporting category and expand that folder. Keep expanding the sub-folders until you can see the report you wish to run.
3. Double-click the report.
4. The report may be an interactive one that prompts you for information prior to displaying the output. If, for example, it asks you to specify a date range within which the report is to apply, enter the relevant start and end date, and click Run Report. Note that clicking the “PoP” link adjacent to either field in such a case would display a calendar window from which you can select a date, which is inserted into the field when you click Use This Date/Time. If you are asked to specify some other filter such as a department or a postcode, enter the information asked for, and click Run Report. Note that, in the case of a filter for which you have to type text, you can use the % character as a wildcard.
5. Observe the results appearing in the right-hand pane. If the output contains listed records with column headings at the top, you can click any of these headings to sort the displayed records by the column concerned. If the output contains listed call records, each call reference will be a hyper-link, which, when clicked, will display an active page showing much the same
information as the Call Details form. To then redisplay the report output, you can simply click the Back arrow button on the toolbar.
6. If the report output is displaying column-related SQL filter fields above the respective columns, you can enter suitable criteria in any number of these to view only the records that are of interest to you. Within each filter field, the criteria would consist of the required WHERE expression minus the portion before the first operator (which is implied by the column to which the field relates). As a simple example, you could enter > 1120 in the filter field above a Call Reference column to limit the display to those call records whose references are greater than F0001120. You need to click Apply Filter to refresh the output pane and thus show the filtered data.