When you go into Reports, you’ll see a box labeled My Folders. These folders are associated with your own user account, and you can manage your own any way you want.
Folders are places to store Templates, Reports and Output.
- Templates — Templates are forms that you can use to create reports. Templates generally some fixed elements and some variable ones — they are the order form you fill out for a particular type of report.
- Reports — Reports are what the system actually runs based on how you filled in a template. Reports can be single instances (run one time) or recurring (daily, every ten days, monthly, etc.)
- Output — The output is the results for a report. Output can be presented in a graph or tabular display in the staff client, or as a CSV file that can be downloaded and opened in Excel or other programs.
In order to run reports, you must have at least one Reports subfolder and one Output subfolder. You can organize your folders any way that you want, but it’s standard to use a parallel structure for templates, reports and output.
Setting Up Report Folders — Screencast
The basic reports process would be to choose a template, create a report and go view the output.
The same template can be used to create many different reports.
For example:
- Template:
- Items added by date range and copy location
- Reports:
- Items added July 10 for all my library’s copy locations
- Items added July 1-14 for all my library’s children’s locations
- Items added previous day for all my library’s location excluding On Order, In Process and Interlibrary Loan, recurring report run at daily at 6 AM
- Output:
- Items added previous day for all my library’s location excluding On Order, In Process and Interlibrary Loan, Run July 17, 2012
- Items added previous day for all my library’s location excluding On Order, In Process and Interlibrary Loan, Run July 16, 2012
- Items added previous day for all my library’s location excluding On Order, In Process and Interlibrary Loan, Run July 15, 2012
- Items added July 10 for all my library’s copy locations
- Items added July 1-14 for all my library’s children’s locations
By default, all folders are private, but they can also be shared at different levels of the organizational tree.
Folders and Links
The interface to folders is a little confusing. There are two things you can click on, folder icons and links. Currently, all templates are in folders that are owned the NOBLE user and shared with all NOBLE users (which means everybody.) Any user can decide to share any of their folders with other users from their library or all of NOBLE.
- At the top level, click on the folder icon to expand the folder tree and see subfolders. (The folder icon only appears if there are subfolders.)
- At the top level, click on link to add subfolders
- When the top folder is open, click the subfolder link to open it to see and work with the templates, report or output files within.
- When the subfolder is open, there are two links at the top of the screen to let you toggle between Manage Folder Contents (the default display) and Manage Folders
