Manage Quick Reports

Quick Report is a flexible and fast way to create simplified reports in and should be used as a complement to more complex reports built with the Report Builder.

Contents

Manage Quick Reports and Report Categories

Quick Reports and Quick Reports Categories are managed in the Quick Reports window. Use this feature to create, import or modify Quick Reports.
Navigate to Solution Manager/Administration/Quick Report Categories

The Quick Reports feature gives you an overview of all reports and it can be quite useful when you have larger number of reports. From this feature you can navigate to the Quick Report  feature (detail) with the right mouse menu option  "Show Details...".

Column Description
Category Shows the Quick report category. All Quick reports must have a category. If the Quick Report doesn’t have any category assigned, the default category, ”Default”,  will be used. If the supplied Report Category doesn’t exist, it will be created, with protection private as default.
Report Title The name of the Quick Report. This name must be unique, two reports with the same name are not allowed.
Type Shows the type of Quick Report. When defining new quick reports you must select the appropriate type.

Note: MS Report, Dashboard and Web report is only available if you have the Business Intelligence Extension installed.

Query The SQL expression that is the source to the SQL quick report.

Note: When referencing DB objects, they should be prefix with schema owner. Therefore when including a query in SQL quick report, schema owner should be specified. According to that way, respective permissions will be granted.
eg: IFSAPP.customer_info

Report Reference Specifies a reference to a report. This will be different things depending on the Quick Report Type.

Note: MS Report, Dashboard and Web report is only available if you have the Business Intelligence Extension installed.

SQL Statement Empty
Crystal Reports Crystal Report file name
MS Report MS Report Name
Dashboard Dashboard Name
Web Report URL for the report
Query Builder Empty
Comments The comments that include important information about the Quick report.
Presentation Object The corresponding Presentation Object for this quick report.

All reports are grouped into Categories to help the user to find the reports easily and also for easy administration. You can create new Categories just by right-clicking on the node and select "Add Category" in the Quick report categories page. 

Create Quick Report

In the Quick Report Categories (tree view) feature, to create a new report, right-click on the category where the report should be added and select Add Report. This can be achieved also from the List Quick Report Feature with standard operations.

Enter a name for the report and what type of report it is; SQL Statement, Crystal Report or Query Builder. If the type is a Crystal Report you should specify the file name of the report (on disk) at the report reference field. For SQL Statements you must add a SQL Expression. This SQL Expression should not contain any tables since end-users do not have the permission to query tables. For Query Builder Quick Reports you use the designer to create and test your report. No File name is required.

You may also add any comments to the report in the comments field. Once you click on save the Quick Report is persisted but in order for end users to execute the report they must be granted the report. When saving the report a Presentation Object is created which corresponds to this report and shown in the Presentation Object field in the form. In order to grant the privilege to execute this report you have to grant the Presentation Object. Granting Presentation Objects are normally done in the Permission Set form but a convenient way is to right-click on the report in the tree and select Publish (Or use the 'Publish' link in the quick report detail page). This will grant the Report to all Permission Sets which are granted the Database Objects which the Report uses.

A report can also be added by importing a Quick Report from a SQL file. To do this in Quick Reports Categories (tree view) feature right-click on a Category and select "Import SQL Statement". The imported Quick Report must also by granted to end user in the same way as described above. The feature only applies on SQL Statement and Query Builder Type reports.

In SQL and Query Builder quick reports, results are presented in a table window. When displaying the result, SQL column names/ aliases will be formatted to Camel case in order to make it more readable. In multi-part column names/aliases,  ‘_’ (underscore) and space are considered as delimiters and the character following any of these will be capitalized.

Eg.  order_number   : Order Number

       ORDER NUMBER: Order Number

Note: The Presentation Object will initially belong to component Base Server (FNDBAS). In the case of a Quick Report of type SQL-statement, the statement will be evaluated and the database objects used will be added to the Presentation Object. This evaluation will not take place when using Crystal Reports, MS Reports, Dashboards nor when the Quick Report is using IAL-views. Those types will require some manual security administration.

Preview Quick Report

To test the report, while In the Quick Reports Categories (tree view) feature and List Quick Report feature, click on the 'View Report' right mouse option and the report will be executed, In Quick Report detail feature you have a Link label for this purpose. The feature only applies on SQL Statement and Query Builder Type reports.

Export and Import Quick Reports

A Quick Report may be exported to a SQL file. In the Quick Reports Categories (tree view) feature, right-click on the report in the tree and select Export SQL Statement...option, in the Quick Report detail feature the Export SQL Statement link label is used to perform the same operation The exported SQL from the Quick Report can then be imported into another installation using the Import SQL Statement operation.

Export and Import of one or more Quick Reports of type Sql Statement can be done in the Quick Reports Overview window. Select one or more Quick Reports and use the Export... option in the right-click menu. Use the Import option in the same window to import the Quick Reports. (The difference of using this option when compared to importing and exporting of sql is, here you are exporting and importing the report and in the earlier method you exported and imported the SQL statement only) Transferring a Quick report this way between environments will preserve the connection to the Presentation Object and Quick Report Category. If  the Quick Report already exists a dialog shows up asking if you want to replace the existing Quick Report or not.

Deploying Crystal Reports

In order to preview Quick Reports of type Crystal, the reports to be previewed should be deployed in to a folder in the machine where the IFS Crystal Web Service is running. Create a folder in the machine where the IFS Crystal Web Service is running and copy the Crystal Report files (*.rpt file) that are going to be viewed. This folder is referred to as the OpenReportPath. In the installation process this folder is configured in the Web.Config file found in the IIS virtual directory for the IFS Crystal Web Service.

Known Limitations

  1. SQL expressions which does not start with "SELECT" clause (Eg: - "WITH") are not supported due to a limitation in the PL/SQL access provider. Output channels could be used in such cases to export data to excel file.
  2. SQL expressions can not have bind arguments in the GROUP BY expression.
  3. SQL expressions can not have non English characters such as Å,Ä,Ö as parameter names. However parameter values can contain such characters.