Report - Custom Report

Created by Sagecom Support, Modified on Thu, 10 Aug, 2023 at 2:02 PM by Sagecom Support

Custom Reports

The Custom Reports section allows you to manage and execute custom report queries.

On the initial Custom Reports page, you can view already existing reports.

To execute one of them and see the result immediately, click the Execute icon for a particular report.

Click the Schedule button on the toolbar to see information about scheduled report execution.

To create a new report, click Add and choose the type of the report (one of the pre-defined types). Click Save to proceed in defining the report.

Type in a descriptive name for the new report. This is the name that will be displayed on the Custom Reports page.

Choose the time zone that will be applied to the date ranges of the report execution. This time zone will be applied to the date(s) in the report execution results and will also appear in the filename with the result report. Keep in mind that the user’s time zone will be applied to all the execution dates ( Start Time, Last Run and Completion Time ).

If the time zone for the report execution coincides with the user’s time zone, you can simply set the time zone to Auto . In that case, the report will be executed in the user’s time zone.

You can also create a new custom report as a clone of an existing one. For this, open the report you want to clone and click the Clone button. The cloned report inherits all of the parameters from the original report and can then be customized as desired.

On the Edit Custom Report page, you can alter various parameters of this report.

Click the Execute button on the toolbar to run the report and immediately see the result in your web browser.

Query Info tab

Field	Description
Send Report To Owner	If this check box is selected, after every query execution the user who executes the report will receive a copy of the report result by email. (Make sure you have defined your email address in the user settings.)
Send Copy To	Send a copy of the report result to another email address.
Description	General description of this report.

Input Parameters tab

The content of this tab is based on a particular report, and allows you to manage report parameters, e.g. for “Most popular destinations” you are able to specify the date range and customers.

For input parameters which contain date/time values, there are two methods of entering values:

You can type in a specific value, e.g. “01-Jan-2007”; this value will always stay the same for any report execution.
You can specify a moment in time as an offset from the scheduled report execution date. For instance, you can set up the “Customer’s most popular destinations” report to run every night at 5 am, and specify that it should cover an interval from 21 hours to 10 hours prior to the report time. As a result, you will always receive a report that includes calls made by the customer during business hours on the previous day. Parameters may also be populated automatically with a date after the actual report time: for instance, every Monday you can run a report to obtain a list of invoices that will become overdue during the next seven days.

Output Formats tab

This tab includes two separate areas: Output Format, where you can define how the values of columns should be presented in the report, and Data Sorting, where you define how the report data should be sorted.

Field	Description
Column	Name of the report column.
Visible	Whether this column should be included in the report. If you uncheck this option, the given column will simply be skipped in the report result.
Format	Formatting of the column data (e.g. whether the total number of minutes should be displayed as 380 or 380:00).
Post Processing Rule	This field functions like the post-processing rules in templates (for more details, see the PortaBilling Templates Guide). It allows you to modify the actual value extracted from the database before it is shown in the report. For instance, if the value in the database gives the total number of seconds, you can divide it by 60 to display the value in minutes to the user.
Suppress Dup	If activated, duplicate column values in adjacent rows will not be displayed – see the example below.

The Suppress Duplicates option allows you to make your reports more readable by removing excess information. Compare the two datasheets below, in which the same data is shown, but where the right one has Suppress Duplicates enabled for certain columns.

Field

Description

Column

Name of the report column.

Sort

Specifies the sorting mode for this column:

From A to Z – Data is sorted in ascending order (i.e. Andrew will be at the top of the list, and Zack at the bottom).
From A to Z – Data is sorted in descending order (i.e. Zack will be at the top of the list, and Andrew at the bottom).
Dash – This column is not used for data sorting at all.

Up / Down

If there are multiple columns used in sorting, their order is very important. Here you can arrange the sequence of the sort columns. For instance, if you want to sort data first by country name and then by the number of minutes, use the and arrows to move the Country column above the Minutes column.

Schedule tab

This tab allows you to schedule automatic report execution (single-time or periodic) in the future and to see when a report was last generated.

Click the Add button on the toolbar to add a new entry.

Field	Description
Start Time	Date and time when the report should be produced.
Periodic	Specifies whether the report should only be produced once, or generated every day, week or month.
Last Run	The date when the report was last executed (if applicable).
Status	Current status of the report: Waiting – Report execution has not started yet, and is scheduled for the future. Completed – The report was to be executed only once, and this has already been done. Running – The report is currently being produced.
Suspend	Allows you to temporarily disable report execution (but not delete the entry from the report schedule). This may be convenient if you are leaving for vacation and would like to avoid having reports piling up in your inbox during your absence.

NOTE: Start Time specifies only the “preferred” start time for the report. Report execution will not start earlier than the specified time, but it may start later if there are some other conflicting tasks at the specified time. For instance, if two reports are scheduled to be executed at 06:00, only one of them will start at that time, while the other will start only after the first one has finished.

Reports tab

This tab allows you to browse results for the ten previous report executions. Thus, if you did not save the original result, you do not have to run the reports over again.

Click the View icon to see the corresponding file.