/hc/en-us/articles/4405155759131-Overview-of-Vault-Reporting-and-Dashboards-Beginner
Introduction:
Vault Reporting and Dashboards allow you to track, analyze and visualize your global data. This overview will introduce you to the core capabilities of Vault Reporting and Dashboards and will provide links to helpful additional content if you would like to learn more.
Creating a Report Type
Vault admins have the ability to create Report Types within Admin > Configuration > Report Types. Report Types determine which objects and combinations of objects are available for end-users to create reports from.
When you click on the dropdown in the Primary Reporting Object box within the Report Types tab, you will see all of the objects in your Vault. If you select one, you may then decide to add related objects to the report type by selecting the Add Related Object button. This will present all of the objects that have a direct relationship with your object. Up arrows will be placed next to the objects that the primary object directly references and down arrows will be placed next to the objects that directly reference the primary object. You may add up to 10 objects to your report type.
Above we have selected the object Study as our primary reporting object and added Document as a “down” object. As you add objects to your report type the Label and the Name are automatically updated unless you have previously defined a Label. Once you click Save, end users who have read access to all of the underlying objects will be able to create reports using this report type.
Creating a Basic Report
Users with permission to create reports based on application and object permissions may navigate to the report creator page and select a report type. Report types are grouped based on the primary object in the report type, and users shall only see report types they have access to. Users may optionally define a Name and Description on the creator page, but they will have an opportunity to do this later when saving their report as well. Below we have selected the Study with Document report type.
After selecting a report type and clicking continue on the creator page, users are taken to the report builder page where they define the details of the report including columns, sorting, filters and groups. Users may add fields for the included objects by clicking on the Edit Columns button on the far right below the filter section.
After defining the report, users can click on the Run button to see the results. Users may export the results to Excel, CSV and PDF. You can see the available actions by clicking on the ellipsis icon on the far right. Because this user is an admin, the bulk actions options are available in addition to export options.
Users who have the ability to edit or create a report may also share the report with other users. By default, until the report is shared, only the user who created the report and members of the Report Owner and Report Administrators groups may access the report. All users who run a report will only see data that their permission sets allow.
Defining Filters and Prompts
Filters and prompts are an important part of creating an effective report. Instead of seeing all records for the entities in your report type, you can focus the results down to only those that are currently relevant to you. Filters may be defined on all of the fields for any of the entities included in your report type. Depending on the data type of the field, for example, Date, Text, and Number, you will see different operators like equals, greater than, in, and contains. You may define as many filters as you like in your report. By default all of your filters will have an implicit AND between them.
Prompts are special filters that are determined at runtime and allow the user who is running the report to determine the value to filter by. This makes your report more flexible because a single report can be used to focus on many different time periods for example.
Because reports that return more records take longer to run, for users with access to hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents or records, defining filters can help ensure the report provides a good user experience.
Performing Calculations Across Rows with Groups
One of the benefits of reports is that you can calculate metrics across records such as record counts, sums, averages, minimums and maximums. The first step to creating a summary calculation is defining a group within the report. On the builder page, directly below the column header on the far left you will see a dropdown next to the words “Group rows by”. Here you can select a field such as a date field if you would like to see a time series. Note, if you select a date or datetime field, you are then presented with the options to group by day, week, month, quarter and year. Or you may want to select the name field of the primary object if you would like to perform a calculation across the related records for each of the primary records.
Once you select a field to group your rows by, number, date, datetime and ID fields in your report will display a summary calculation dropdown. For number fields you can select average, max, min, or sum, and for date/datetime fields you can select max or min. When sum is selected for number fields, you may decide to display them as a percentage. For ID fields the distinct count function is displayed.
You may also want to add the count columns. For each entity included in your report, you will find that when you click the Edit Columns button, there is a field that includes the word Count. If you add this column for each of the entities, it will display the count of the entity within the group. The column can either be displayed as a number or a percentage.
Above we group our report by both Study Number and Document Type. We have added the Document Count column and elected to display it as a percentage at the study group level. We have also added a min function to Document Created Date and are calculating the sum of the Document Size field.
Above you can see the results when we run this report. The data is grouped and all you can see is data that pertains to the Study Number grouping. However, if you click the arrows next to Study Number, you will see the data that pertains to the Type grouping, and finally the record level detail. There are blank metrics where there are no documents for a particular study.
One limitation of grouping today is that your first grouping must be on a field from either the primary object or an object that the primary object directly references with an outbound reference.
Tabular and Matrix Report Types
When you are first creating your report, you may choose from two report formats: Tabular and Matrix. All of the above examples have shown tabular reports and in general they are preferred, however, matrix reports can be useful. For example, let’s say the main focus of your report is to find the count of documents by Study and Document Type. We are able to calculate this metric in a tabular report, but matrix reports allow us to display the counts in a similar format to an Excel Pivot table where one axis is the Study, the second axis is the Document, and the cells at the intersection is a metric.
Above you can see the configuration for this report. We have elected to group rows by Study Number, group columns by Document Type and display the count of documents as a number. We could elect to perform different calculations in the cells as well and display the calculations as percentages. The final report can be seen below. Users can see details of the records by clicking on the numbers.
Creating a Dashboard
Dashboards allow you to create compelling visualizations using data from your reports. Each chart on a dashboard references a single report, and a dashboard can be composed of multiple charts each referencing a different or the same report. Dashboards support a variety of chart types including bar, column, line, pie, number, pareto and gauge, each with their own configuration options.
The first step to creating a dashboard is to configure the underlying reports. Reports with at least one group can be used to create any type of chart. Reports with two groupings have the additional options of stacked bar charts, percentage stacked bar charts and multi-line charts. Reports without groupings can only be used to create number and gauge charts. Charts by default show counts by group, but if other calculated fields are defined such as sums or averages, those may be presented as well.
Above we have selected our Study with Document report within the chart configuration and chosen the column chart type. For our X-axis we can choose from either of the two groups we defined in the report: Study Number or Document Type. For the Y-axis we can display any of the metrics we defined including document count or sum of the size. Because our report contains two groupings, we see the Group By dropdown and the Group Styling options.
After we have configured our chart and clicked continue, we can arrange the sizing of our charts within the dashboard. Because our chart contains many studies with documents, in order to have the data fit the chart a little better, we clicked on the loudspeaker icon in the top right corner which expanded the chart across the full page.
The final chart displays all studies with documents in alphabetical order with the documents grouped by type. To change the order, perhaps from most documents to least, we can change the sort order of our groups within the report. Finally, to navigate to the details of the report, a user can click on any of the data in the chart. We stop at one chart for now in our dashboard, but one of the main benefits of dashboards is aggregating the data from many reports into a single view which can provide a holistic overview of a process.
Like reports, dashboards must be shared with other users, and other users may only see data in the dashboard that their permission sets allow. When a dashboard is shared with another user, the underlying reports are shared as well.
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