Using the Report Builder in Service Manager 6.5
LiveTime 6.5 now permits ad-hoc reporting directly within the application in addition to the standard reports and Pentaho Report Designer. This new designer allows customers to develop and share reports with any other role within the system.
Anyone familiar with the way SQL constructs queries will immediately feel at home, while other users will get up to speed quickly. Here is an example of how to generate a report.
Details
The service organization may need to know what countries are generating the bulk of the incidents coming into the service desk. This report will be named ‘Total Incidents by Country’, and it will be located under Requests -> Incident within the reports, shared with other supervisors.
From
In order to build the report a base object is needed which in this case is the ‘Incident’ entity. The ‘Request Customer Country’ entity is also required, but to access this, the ‘Request Customer’ entity must be added first.
Select
A count by country is desired, so for the select, the objective is to count the request ID’s. Click the + button to add this selection.
This will provide the counts but in addition to this we need to see the names of the respective countries in the result.
Where
This report should exclude records that are archived or deleted, so select those fields of the incident, setting the expression to ‘False’. Click the + button to add terms.
Having
Since the select uses a function, the ‘having’ selection is available. Since the report is looking for high volume countries, it is possible to exclude countries with less than 5 results using the ‘Greater or Equal to’ expression.
Grouped By
The counts need to be collated by country, so in the group by the ‘Request Customer Country.Name’ should be added.
Order By
The key metric is the count, so this report should be sorted by the count, in descending order, so the highest values appear at the top of the report.
Chart
Inclusion of a chart showing the results can aid the presentation of result data, in this case the x axis will contain the country names, and the y axis will represent the counts.
The report definition is now complete and it can be saved (which makes it accessible in the specified location), alternatively a sample can be generated using the test button.
Navigating to the Incident reports shows the custom report, prefixed with an asterisk for identification. It can be accessed and executed by the owner and other supervisors per the sharing options.
This report is a good base but it requires some fine tuning as it will currently report against all service requests ever raised. The desired data is likely to be over a smaller time frame. This can be achieved by adding some runtime parameters to the where clause. Click edit with the report selected and the report builder is opened, with the current definition in place.
Adding the above fields will allow start and end dates to be specified when the report is accessed. Click Save, and the report generation page now includes the newly added date fields.
