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jamma

18 Posts

Posted - 11/20/2006 :  14:07:43  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
I think build 130 significantly improves the end-user experience by implementing a more intuitive "My Reports" feature. For those interested, go to Admin-->Settings-->[Security tab] and uncheck "..save report as personal shadow" and check "Show private reports on top".

Now, your users can right click on any report and copy it to their own "My Reports" folder (now the first item in the menu tree), or click the "save" button within (most) report types to save a copy to their personal folder. We have hundreds of reports and, although they are organized as meaningfully as possible, most users use only 10 or so (you can check this via usage reports), so a personal "My Reports" folder is what most people want. Report Portal finally delivers.

Caveats: A user can right-click copy a report to their own folder using the same name as the original even if your site settings enforce unique names (this isn't a bad thing, since it really is the same report at this point). However, once it's in their My Reports folder, any attempt to save it (whether or not it's been modified) will require a new name to be chosen. Not really a big issue, but something users might ask about (ours did).

Second, if a user has saved a personal report shadow of a report, the copy function will not copy the shadow, but the original report. This caused a little end user confusion. Note that the My Reports feature basically replaces the notion of Report Shadows, and IMHO this is a good thing.

"My Reports" is simply the better way to handle custom/personalized views of a report. No longer will you destroy everyone's shadows when you change the underlying report. No longer will there be confusion because Sally's view of Report A in folder B is different from Joe's. The downside is the manual one-time recreation of the info currently stored in "shadows" that end-users will have to go through.

And now, a question: As a way of introducing this great new feature, we wanted to set up the My Reports folders of our top 10 report users with their own most used reports (based on the Report Portal usage reports). As an Admin, you can see everyone's "My Reports" folder (the username is appended in parentheses so you can tell them apart). So we thought the task would be simple: we'll just right-click-copy the reports they use into their own "My Reports" folder.

Unfortunately, this didn't work. For some reason, it's not true that any report within a user's "My Reports" folder can be seen by them. I guess we as copiers were seen as the report owner, and the folder owner can't see them.

The question, then is this: How can we make it so that reports we copy into a user's My Reports folder can be seen by them? I couldn't easily discern this from the schema or stored procedures. We'd be happy to just default the system such that the owner of a My Reports folder can see anything put in their folder, if this is easier to implement.

Thanks in advance for any help you are able to provide.

admin

1645 Posts

Posted - 11/20/2006 :  21:21:54  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
1) The problem seems to be that “Report Copying” does not do unique name validation. Is this assessment correct? If yes, would unique name validation solve the problem?

2) Here is the script you can use to make Private reports visible in the private folder. It assumes that there are no subfolders defined.

update r
SET r.LastAuthorId = f.OwnerId
from QueryFolder f
inner join Report r ON f.FolderId = r.FolderId
where f.OwnerId is not null
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Bruce

Canada
51 Posts

Posted - 12/01/2006 :  07:36:33  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Suggestion

This macro is great, but I wonder if you can automatically change the security when you save the file to a private folder. Right now I write a lot of reports for people, drop them into their private folders. Then I have to go back and run security to let them see the report.

Thanks
Bruce

Edited by - Bruce on 12/01/2006 07:37:02
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admin

1645 Posts

Posted - 12/07/2006 :  23:51:45  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Build 132 solves the problem. However, it will not work for old subfolders under private folder.
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