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Building Reports

Getting Started

As with any Report Writer, an understanding of database structure and the system is very important.  Example - The boss asks for a list of students who are past due on their training requirements.  Understanding this information is in the Student Table and CoursesNeeded Table, they can be linked together by the common unique field - StudentID.  Thus, joining the 2 tables together and then choosing the data fields needed from the right table - student name, supervisor name, contact information, course name, date needed, etc...  Once the report is built, the data can be seen in a PDF, Excel or Web view.  It is easy and fast, if you understand where the data is located in the database.

Check out Izenda Wiki for additional information. 

Common Terms

Data Source: The group of related information which will be used to pull data from the databases into a report format.

Example: View_CoursesNeeded is a data source which combines information about Students and the outstanding requirements.

Field: A single piece of information stored in a data source.

Example: In the View_CoursesNeeded, the field “LastName” will display the last name of each student in the system.  In Excel, this would be a column.

Record: A group of all the fields related to a single person, course or combination of the two.  In Excel, this would be a row.  

Filter: A narrowing down of all data to only relevant data based on criteria selected.

Example: You only need to see what courses are coming due this quarter - "Date Needed" in "Current Quarter"

See also