Summary Reports

When selected, this action creates a report where ExtraView will provide a count of the number of issues under different headings. Summary reports can be saved as personal or public reports. Examples include:

  • A breakdown of how many issues have been fixed by each engineer in a given period
  • The number of issues for each status, broken down by owner
  • A breakdown by severity level of all open issues in the system

Using Summary reports, project or area managers can have a snapshot, at any time of the current overall project status. This sort of information is invaluable for producing internal status reports that are backed by real data.

You are able to select from any fields to which you have read permission, and which are able to be summarized. For example, you can typically summarize on different values in a list, but cannot summarize on text fields. To prepare a new Summary report, choose the Create New Summary Report option. The screen presented to you will be similar to the following:

Creating a new summary report

  • If your administrator has enabled the option that allows you to search for users that have been disabled, you will see a checkbox option that allows you to Show Inactive Users. When you click in the checkbox, the screen will refresh and all user lists will show inactive as well as active users. Note that this option only works with the Standard Query screen, and does not work with the Advanced Query screen.
  • There is an option in the preparation of Summary Reports, to click on a checkbox titled, Add Statistics to Report. If you choose this option, the report output will include additional information, in the form of percentages, minimums, maximums and the mean of the counts of issues generated on the report
  • The Aggregation Method allows you to either produce a summary report that counts the number of issues within each row of the report, or accumulates the total of a numeric field within the row of the report.  If you choose to Sum Issues, then a list of all the numeric fields appears.  Choose the field you want to total on the report output
  • There is a button to the right of the Report Title that appears when you are editing an existing report. When you place your mouse over this button, you will see who created the report, who last updated the report and the dates when these actions occured. This is most useful for managing public reports
  • The option Include Rows with no Data allows you to include rows within the results that had no results. Although this is not normally useful, consider the use case where you want to use the report as a target for issues that are going to be dropped on the report. Including zero rows on the report allows you to drop issues onto reports that have no value up to the time you drop the issues
  • The Display on Mobile button will allow the report to appear on a mobile phone or tablet
  • The Output Report Definition button places the options and filters used in the production of the report at the end of the output

Selecting columns to summarize and display

  • Select the columns that you require on your report, by double-clicking on each field name. If you want to alter the order of the fields being summarized on the report, you can click on a field in the right-hand box and drag it to a new position. To remove a field from the report, drag it out of the box
  • You can choose from one to ten columns to summarize on a single summary report

Sample summary report

Sample summary report with statistics

Summary Reports and Repeating Records

If you prepare a summary report, and include one or more fields from the repeating record as any the fields that is to be summarized, then it is possible (indeed probable) that an individual record will be summarized into more than one line of the summary report that is displayed.

This works without problem, and you can drill down from an individual line of the report to see the issues that made up the total for the line. The totals for the displayed summary report will be accurate totals of the lines of the report. If you drill down into the total and grand total lines of the displayed summary report, the issues that were included on different lines of the summary report are not repeated as this would be confusing. However, this does lead to the possibility that there will be fewer issues on the drill-down report than appear in the total of the summary report.

For example, you may see a grand total of 135 issues on a summary report, but when you drill down into this total, there may only be 125 issues displayed. This probably indicates that 10 of the issues rightfully appeared in two rows of the summary report.

Summary Reports and Date Fields

Date fields are stored within ExtraView, with the time component accurate to the nearest millisecond. Therefore, if you want to summarize on a date field, you should recognize that the count of issues with the identical date is likely to be one! This may be a little surprising at first, but it is accurate. ExtraView provides alternative methods for summarizing on date fields, so you can answer questions such as “How many issues were opened by each support technician on a given day”? Inbuilt date fields such as “Date Created” have an alternative form, which is the truncated version of the date, i.e. with no time component. If your administrator has given you access to these, then summarizing on this will give a total account within a day. Also, if your administrator configured a date field such that the time component is ignored, then the fields will summarize by the complete day.

If you summarize on a normal date field, the behavior also depends on your personal time format, stored within your personal information. If you have a date format that includes the time within the day, the report will most likely show you a single row for each date entry, with a count of 1. The date displayed on each row will show the time. If your personal date format does not include time, then all the date values are consolidated onto a single label for all the rows of the report, and you will still see one row for each date within the report.

Displaying Only the Top Summarized Results

It can be useful when displaying a summary report to only display the most significant results. For example, a summary report may display 100 rows, but you might only be interested in the ten rows with the highest values. To achieve this, there is filter that is normally used in conjunction with the advanced query mode, titled Top-n rank filter. For the above example, if you set the filter to Top-n rank filter less than or equal to 10, then only the ten highest values will be displayed. If you set the filter to be Top-n rank filter equal to 3 only the third highest value will be displayed. Note that this feature is not supported on all databases.

If your installation is utilizing MySQL or Apache Derby as its underlying database, then this feature is inoperable.

Hierarchical Summary Reports

If your administrator has defined hierarchies on which you can report, you will see an additional prompt on the report editor screen:

Reporting on hierarchies within summary reports is similar to the way they are defined for column reports. The key difference is that you are only required to select the filters for each level in the hierarchy. These filters will be applied to each level of the hierarchy for the preparation of the data to be placed on the report. The report output will look very similar to a standard summary report, except that the additional filters are applied.