 Hello, and welcome to the video on creating custom reports. Today we're going to cover creating a basic report in Tracket. So this version of Tracket, the report writer, is built into the product. There isn't a separate or external report writer required from any other vendor. The report writing tool is actually built right into Tracket. So I'm going to click on my menu. I'm going to come down and select Reports. That'll open my Reports module. You'll notice there's a bunch of canned reports that come with each section of the product. So here's a bunch of canned help desk reports, there's some solution reports, asset management, et cetera. There are also some administration reports which print out some of the different lookups. And you can also create your own administration reports to print out other values from the database if you'd like. The print preview section here, this is where you actually define the print preview that's going to print out of each module. So you'll notice there's a ticket print report. This is actually the report that prints out when you print a ticket from within the help desk module. If you want to customize the print out of the ticket from the help desk module, what you would do here is click on the report, you would click on copy, update the report to make your changes, then you would go in and use form customization to change the print out that prints out from behind the print button on the ticket form. So for now, we're just going to run through two simple ways to create a report. One simple way is to create a report from scratch. So I'm going to go back to my help desk area because I'm going to create a ticket report. And I'm going to click on the new button right here just to create a report from scratch. Sometimes this is a difficult way to create a report because it comes with no formatting, no data selection, no tables selected, no fields on the form. You're really starting with a completely blank report. So I'm going to show you what that looks like. I click on new, I have to enter a title. I can enter a description if I like. And then since I'm in the help desk area, it asks me if I want to use tickets or assignments for my report. Well, I'm going to select them both because there's a chance I might have assignments linked to tickets. So I'm going to go ahead and select them both. I'm going to hit design report. And now track is going to bring up the report designer. The very first time you load this, it might take a little bit because it has to load the component into memory. But once you do that, now it's cached and it should load much faster next time. So this is what I was referring to before. You really have a blank slate when you're starting from a brand new report. So this can sometimes be a little bit challenging. Now this is a banded report writer which is very similar to an access report or a crystal report or any other type of report that uses report banding like this where you have a top margin, you can add headers, you can add other footers, your details of where all your fields are going to go for multiple instances of a record. So for example, you might put a header up here in the top margin that says ticket number and then you'll put the actual ticket number field in the detail section because that'll get repeated for every single record for the data that is selected for this particular report. So you'll notice over here on the right you've got your menu here of all the different things you can do. So by default, I'm on the properties of the report and you can see under properties now I can select my data source and my data member and so here I wanna select ticket. So I can enter filter string here if I want to filter out specific data and I can build that filter string by clicking on the little ellipses button here. I can click the plus sign here and I can add a condition and I can enter what I want. So I can pick the field from my ticket that I want to use and then I can do my operator and then I can enter my value and that's how I would build my filter. I can modify the appearance of the report from here and there are a ton of options in here that you can go through so we're not gonna go through every single one. Basically I just wanna show you that this is where all the properties of the report are and if I click this little drop down at the top it's gonna show you these are the items that are currently in my report. So I have a bottom margin which you see over here on the left is the purple area. I have a detail area which is this middle band. I have a top margin which is this top area here and I have the report itself. So if I select new report which is my report itself all the details below it here are gonna be related to specifically the report. If I come and select detail you'll notice some of these things change and now I see properties that are related specifically to the detail of my report. You'll notice underneath the properties button here on the right there's a field list button. So if I click on this I can open my track data source here and I can open my ticket source and now I have fields from my ticket form. So let's say I wanna come down and put in ticket ID. I can click on this and drag it over and drop it in my details section of my report. And now if I go back to the properties of my report you will notice that I now have another item listed here and that is my ticket ID field and when I select that I see properties specifically for that field. So if I want to change my label I can do that. I can change the label that shows up next to it. The little buttons here on the right are to reset values back to the default. You'll notice that the field has a little database looking container icon next to it. That's how you know that it's actually a database field. If I was gonna just put a generic text control on the form all my generic controls over here on the left so I could just go over here and click on this label. I could go and insert that and you'll notice that that label now doesn't have that little database container icon there because it's just a text label. So I have other controls over here on the left. I can add lines. I can add charts. There's all sorts of things I can add. The toolbar at the top of course has your cut, paste and undo and redo and all that kind of stuff. And this button here is a print preview. So if I click on this I'll get a preview of the report that I'm building and notice I just have the label that I put in and the ticket ID and I haven't set any filter. So this is gonna show me every ticket that's in my system right now. So right now you'll see I have four pages worth of data. I'm now seeing just the current page and I could click next to go to the next page or I could come here and click the multi-page view option and now all my pages are displayed here. This button will take me back to my report designer. So one other thing I wanna show you here is I can add other groups. So I could go back to my dropdown here on my report properties and I can select my report and now you'll notice that underneath actions here I can insert a report header. If I click on that a report header appears. I can insert a page header and I can also insert group headers, more detail bands, group footers, report footers, et cetera. And notice all of these different types of bands that get inserted here. The names of them are pretty self-explanatory. So the top margin is the top margin of every page. The report header prints only once at the beginning of the report. The page header prints on every page. The group header prints at the beginning of every group. So if I wanna group by department, let's say, when I group my report by department, then this group header will print every time there's a new department. So I'm simplifying this greatly, but I'm doing this to kind of show you how many options there are when you build a report from scratch. So if you wanna build a report completely from scratch, one of the best ways to do that is to click on the little menu here on the left and say design and report wizard. So if I click on this, it says, what do you wanna do? Do you want an empty report? No, I don't wanna do that. I don't need a label report. I'm gonna use a data bound report. So I'm gonna select that and click next. It's gonna ask me which data I want. So I'm gonna say I want my tickets. I'm gonna hit next. It's gonna ask me specifically which fields are my tickets I want. So just real quickly, I'm going to select ticket ID. I'm going to select ticket summary and I'm going to select assign to technician. And I'm going to select status. And those are the four pieces of information that I want. Now I'm gonna click next. Now it's asking me how I wanna group it. I was showing you before how you can insert manual groups and how that can get complicated. Here I can just say I wanna group it by my assigned to technician. And this will give me a report grouped by the technicians. I'm gonna hit next. Do I want any calculations to be reported on here? So my ticket ID is gonna be a numeric value. So I don't wanna sum, right? I don't wanna add up my ticket IDs. That would be ridiculous. But I may wanna count them. That might be a good thing to see. So I'm gonna hit next. Now it's asking me do I wanna use a portrait or a landscape view? I didn't use that many fields so I can probably do portrait. Should be fine. And it says adjust the field width so all the fields fit on the page. So that's fine. Now it's gonna give me a couple options here for different styles. Let's see. I kinda like this one. So I'm gonna hit next. This is going to be tickets by technician and I'm gonna hit finish. It's gonna take a second here to load this up. And now we have a tickets by technician report. So now if I save this to make sure that I don't lose any of my changes. Now I'm gonna hit preview and now we get a report that shows all the tickets that I have grouped by technician. Now that's a pretty easy way to at least start with something that you can then modify. It's much easier to start with some kind of report that you then tweak than it is to try to just build everything from scratch. Because now if I go back to my designer you'll notice that there's already a page header put in with some of these labels. There's already a group header put in here for my technician name because I don't want my technician name to print every single time there's a ticket that would kinda look ridiculous on a report. I only want it to print as a header. So you'll notice if I go back to my print preview you'll notice that the technician name is only gonna print once. And then all the tickets that belong to that technician print after that. Let's say for some reason I do want my technician name to print right next to every other piece of ticket data. I could go back to my designer and I could grab my technician field and I could drag it down into my details section here. And now the technician name would print every single time there's a new ticket. And I'll show you what that looks like. So you may want it this way but most people don't. Most people when they're grouping by a certain value would do it the way we had it there a minute ago. So I'm gonna go back to my designer. I'm gonna click undo and I'm gonna tighten up this grouping here a little more because that's how I like it. And now I'm done, I'm gonna save that. That's an easy way to use the report wizard to build yourself a report. So I'm gonna close out of this. Another quick way to build a report is to use one of our canned reports that we've already created for you and use that as your template. I can just click on this. If I click on the little link here it's actually gonna preview the report. If I click on the row it's gonna highlight it. Then I can come up here and say copy. It creates a copy, notice right below it. I can now click on the copy and now I can hit edit. If I'm on one of the canned reports you'll notice the edit button is disabled. But if I go back to my copy now and I click on edit and I click on design and now I've got my open tickets report here and I can change this however I like. I can add fields, I can remove fields, I could add another filter. There are lots of different options. I could remove the track it logo here and add my own logo. There are lots of different things you could do here. So that is using the report writer in track it. One other thing I'll show you quickly here is something we call quick reports. So let's say I'm about to run off to a meeting and I don't even have time to go in and run that report wizard. I just need to get a quick view of open tickets that I can take to my meeting. So I can come into the help desk, I can go to my open tickets view and I can go up to my menu here and I can say export and I can select HTML or CSV. So for the purposes of this example I'm gonna use HTML just so you can see it with a little bit of style added to it because CSV is just gonna be simply that comma separated. You would do CSV if you wanna pull this up in Excel and you wanna do a pivot chart or something like that or you can just do HTML and that'll give you a really quick output of this grid. And so you'll notice now if I open up this HTML file I have a report here now that shows exactly what I was just seeing in my track it grid. That is a really quick way that just export the columns that you want and the filter that you want out to an external HTML file or out to CSV like I said, if you wanna create an Excel chart or Excel pivot table or something like that. So thanks for watching our overview of reporting in track it. For more videos in this training series you can visit our documentation site at docs.bmc.com. If you forget where the documentation is you can always click the help link in the upper right hand corner inside track it. Some other useful resources are the track it community where you can talk with other track it users and support representatives about how to get the most out of your product. You can reach that site at community.trackit.com. You can also reach our technical support directly by visiting support.trackit.com and for general product information you can always visit trackit.com. Thank you for watching and I hope this video has been helpful to you.