Managing Report Studio Custom Groups Best Practices

[daviddstewart]

Hi,

Can folks share their idea of best practices for managing custom groups?

We create reports in report studio using packages by business function.

For example, we create planning reports using the planning group package.

Unfortunately, our end-user base has diverse reporting needs so we are often creating custom groups inside the report studio report.

For example, for one end user, we would create a custom group "Employee Role" where Manager & Assistant Manager would be grouped as "Manager" whereas another report Manager and Part Time Manager would be grouped as "Manager".  One of the big issues we have is if names are changed "Part Time Manager" becomes "PT Manager" or a new role is added such as Manager Trainee...  Then the custom groups need to be updated...

How do you monitor and maintain all of these custom groups?  The number of custom grouping is piling up and inside the reports, they aren't always easy to find.

IT doesn't want to add new dimensions to the package for each report because these packages would then have too many query items...

Thoughts?

[cognostechie]

I don't really understand how you create groups inside a report and what exactly is the purpose. Is it to secure the data to be visible to only a few users?

[daviddstewart]

Thanks Cognostechie,

We create custom groups in a couple of ways:

1)Click the column that you want to group on and, from the Edit Data menu, click Calculate > Define Custom Groups

2)Query > Add Data Item > Use case statement in Expression Definition to define groups. (case when [employee role] like %manager% then 'Manager' else 'Non-Manager' end

We do this so the report will match the each user groups' own unique way of defining employee role for reporting purposes..


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[BigChris]

Sounds to me like that should be a table, either in the database or else in the system. Maintain that table centrally and then bring it through into your reporting environment.