The world of custom reports can be exciting. The possibilities which open up given direct access to the Reporting Database and a dashboard toolbox full of highly configurable visualisations can lead you very quickly to a situation where you could benefit from help and advice.

This article provides some guidance on the kinds of support you can request from Symplectic, and lists some useful documentation for those who wish to delve into the subjects relating to custom reports themselves.

Please note: The ability to design custom dashboards or write custom data extracts requires a licence to the Analytics Module. A Core licence is sufficient for designing custom formatted reports.

The following documentation is there to help with all aspects of the report design journey.

1. Introduction to the Reporting Hub. Read this first, to get a good overview of the concept of custom reports. Be sure to dive into the articles referenced within it, such as the dedicated separate introductions to dashboards, data extracts and formatted reports. There are also some Hello World dashboard design articles that will help you author your first dashboards.

2. Reporting Database guide. This guide documents all of the tables in the reporting database and provides an overview of the data within them. In addition to using it as a reference, there is no substitute for exploring the reporting database yourself.

3. Microsoft SSRS tutorials. This is an example of online documentation relating to SSRS, the component used by Elements for designing, hosting and running custom formatted reports.

4. Web dashboard - designer mode end-user documentation. This documentation, compiled and provided by the third-party provider of the dashboard UI components used by Elements, provides rich documentation on the dashboard designer user interface, explaining the purpose and function of all aspects of the dashboard designer.

5. Web dashboard - viewer mode end-user documentation. This documentation, compiled and provided by the third-party provider of the dashboard UI components used by Elements, provides rich documentation on the dashboard viewer user interface.

You may get to a stage in your report customisations where you wish to know more about related subjects, such as advanced SQL syntax, query performance tuning and so on. Lots of information can be found online in these areas. Here are some that might be useful:

• W3Schools SQL Tutorial

• https://beginner-sql-tutorial.com/sql-query-tuning.htm

• Overview of SQL Server Management Studio

• Analysing a query's execution plan

Symplectic offers support for all aspects of use of Elements, including custom reports. Except where there is a failing in Elements itself, all support relating to custom reports falls under the Client Customisation & Environment section of the Elements Service Level Agreement, and is therefore chargeable at the standard support rate. This includes support for custom reports created by cloning a stock report.

Symplectic is also happy to receive requests for quotes for training sessions, or other targeted support requirements.

A few examples of the forms of support that might be useful are:

• Help with designing new custom reports

• Help with understanding the relevant tables in the Reporting Database

• Help with understanding the technical implementation of a stock report

• Help with investigating or troubleshooting functional or performance issues related to custom reports

• Help with understanding or troubleshooting issues in custom reports related to Elements version upgrades (e.g. due to Reporting Database structural changes) or configuration changes

If this is of interest to you, please see How to request custom work from us.

From time to time when authoring a dashboard, your efforts might put it into a broken state. If you cannot figure out why it is broken, you might consider contacting Symplectic for support. When doing so, please ensure you describe reproducible steps illustrating the problem, along the following lines:

• Get to the very last state in which everything is working "as expected". Describe this (or supply the working dashboard definition - to obtain this, save your dashboard, then go to the Dashboard Management page and click the Download Dashboard icon against the relevant dashboard)

• Find and describe the exact minimum set of reproducible steps/changes you made which transitioned the dashboard from "working as expected" to "broken"

Providing this kind of information can often help us understand what you are doing much more quickly and with much less effort.

Similar advice applies to custom formatted reports and any other type of custom report.

Mastering authorship of custom reports is a journey. Although quick start guides can give you a good feel for the process of designing and deploying reports (particularly dashboards!) in minutes, all dedicated data analysts know that providing useful interactive visual summaries of complex data takes time.

A productive journey will want to include the following:

1. A well-defined question. The single most important thing when considering designing a report is to know exactly what question(s) you want to answer. Without considering this in some depth, you will likely end up staring at the long list of tables in the Elements Reporting Database without knowing which might be relevant to your task.

2. Develop in a test environment: You should not develop custom reports on your production instance of Elements. Instead, start your development in a test/development Elements instance, then transfer the completed report back to your production instance only once you are happy with the outcome of testing it in your test environment. Until you have verified that your report performs to the required standard, this will help avoid causing performance issues in your production Elements system.

3. Data exploration. Is it essential that you are prepared to play with and explore the Reporting Database, discovering where the data you require might be located. Look at the quality of the existing data and ask yourself if it is rich enough to answer your question(s) above. If not, you may want to consider engaging in an exercise to ensure the required data is first entered into Elements. There are many tools freely available on the internet that support exploration of data in SQL-based databases. Our favourite is SQL Server Management Studio, though there are many more out there.

4. Dashboard toolbox exploration. Report design technologies are designed to look simple, but they are also designed to solve lots of different problems. They can therefore be quite complex. There is no substitute for experimentation with the various report visualisations and tools in Elements, and this takes time. On occasion, your experimentation and development will likely put your report into a broken state. Ensure you are regularly saving stable copies of your report so that you can roll back to an earlier working version whenever you need to.

5. Develop against real data. It can be very frustrating to develop a report against a small test dataset only to discover that it does not function efficiently enough to work on a dataset of a more realistic size.

6. Testing. Ensure you test all relevant aspects of your report for the purpose you've created it. This should include:

   • Functional testing (that it answers your original question)

   • Usability testing (that it obviously answers your original question)

   • Performance testing (e.g. that the dashboard renders (refreshes and responds) in a reasonable timeframe for all filter configurations). Please see the following article for more information:

     • Report performance

   • Security testing (that the report does not expose data to those you do not wish to see it). Please see the following article for more information:

     • Report security & data protection

7. Maintenance. Ensure that you maintain a written test plan for each custom report. You should run through it to verify your report still works to your satisfaction during appropriate future events such as major configuration changes you make to Elements, or Elements version upgrades. Please see the following article for more information:

   • Ongoing maintenance of customisations and custom integrations

8. Keep your own documentation. Keep notes regarding the purpose and method of your custom report so that future maintenance efforts need not second-guess why you implemented it the way you did.