[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Reporting

[Karen Collier]

Robert, 

There are links to some information on reporting from this page of the wiki (See #7, Statistical Reporting).  

http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-user:evergreen_end-user_documentation

I have been experimenting with reporting a lot recently and intend to update and add to this documentation in the not too distant future.  Here's the quick and dirty version.

You're looking in the right place.  From the Local Admin Page, click on Reports.  Click on Templates and create at least one subfolder there, as well as at least one subfolder within Reports and Output.  Once you have subfolders created, click on the image of the folder next to "Templates" to expand the menu and see your subfolders.  Click on one of your template subfolders and then click "Create a new Template for this folder."

This will take you into the template building interface, where you can select fields from the database to (eventually) display as columns in an Excel spreadsheet, as well as filters to determine the criteria for which records will get displayed as rows.  

Once your template is as you want it, click Save.  Go back into the subfolder within Templates where you saved the template.  Select that template and choose "Create a new report from the selected template."  Here you will decide when and how often you want the report to run as well as fill in any values you left blank in the filters in your template.  When you're done filling this in, click save report.

If you selected for the report to run immediately or scheduled it for a time in the past, you can look in the output subfolder you selected to see if it has completed yet.  Reports I've done so far have completed very quickly, within a matter of seconds.  Once your report is listed as complete, select it and choose view report output.  This will display a link that lets you open the Excel spreadsheet produced, as well as displaying any other output formats you selected when setting up the report.

It will probably take some experimentation to figure out which database sources to use to get the reports you're looking for, but it definitely sounds like the kind of thing you could get an Evergreen report to do.  I've been very impressed with reporting in Evergreen so far.  It lets me see all kinds of info that I couldn't have gotten to in my former ILS.  :)

Hope this helps,
Karen

Karen Collier
Public Services Librarian
Kent County Public Library
408 High Street
Chestertown, MD 21620
410-778-3636

----- evergreen at copelan.com wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> I have been looking into the reporting in the Staff Client.  In the
> Local Admin menu there is a 
> reporting section but that seems to only create folders.   Evidently
> I've missed (yet again) the 
> Wiki page for how to actually write reports.   
> 
> What I'm looking for  is: 
> - holdings by type, call number
> - costing report for insurance purposes that would list identifying
> info (ISBN, Title, Author, 
> Publisher) and cost 
> 
> Item Display seems to have this type of functionality but the export
> for that only works for short 
> lists.  
> 
> Can anyone please point me to the documentation on how to write custom
> reports within EG.  If it 
> needs to be external (perl, php, c) and directly against the database
> then that is ok too. I just 
> didn't want to go that route if EG already had the capablity. 
> 
> Thanks and have a good weekend.
> 
> RobertC