Creating a Standard Report

As with most things in the on-demand world of the Force Platform, the easiest way to learn about reports is to create some.

You are already familiar with the Force Platform objects in your organization, so you can use that data as the place to start your explorations.

You can get access to the Force Platform reporting system through the Reports tab.

1.	In the runtime environment, click the arrow to the right of the tabs for the Recruiting application to bring up a list of additional tabs. Select the Reports tab to bring up the figure below. You can prevent users from accessing this tab, or limiting other interactions with reports, through their profile permissions, discussed in Chapter 7: Protecting Your Data on security. On this page, you see a list of reports, separated into categories. You can search for reports through the search box at the top of the page and you can also use tags to identify groups of reports. Figure 89. Reports tab [View full size image]
2.	Click Create New Custom Report to bring up the next page.
3.	Select the report type to use as the foundation of the report. The top picklist has categories of report types to limit the choices shown in the lower picklist. Later in this chapter, you learn about custom report types that can be stored in any category, but standard report types for custom objects are listed in the Other Reports category.
4.	Select Other Reports in the top picklist to bring up the list of report types for custom objects, shown in the figure below. You see that there are four basic categories of report types that are automatically created for the Force Platform report system: Report types based on a single custom object Report types based on two related objects Report types based on three objects used to define a many-to-many relationship, such as Positions, Job Applications, and Candidates Report types based on history records for objects that have history tracking enabled. Figure 90. Other Report Types [View full size image]
5.	For your first report, choose the Positions with Job Applications and Candidates report type and click Next to bring up the page shown in the figure below. The next page presents you with the most important decision you need to make to define a report—the type of report to create. You can start with the most basic type of report. There are four buttons in the bottom left corner of the main area. These buttons, repeated on every page of the wizard, allow you to do the following: Run the report Export the detail rows of the report to an Excel format file or a comma-separated variable file See the report in a printable view, stripping out the artifacts of the Force Platform environment in preparation for printing Save the report, which saves the report definition You can perform any of these choices at any stage of the report definition wizard. All the steps in the wizard include defaults that are used if you do not modify any particular options. You can also modify a part of the report through the picklist in the upper right corner of the report wizard pages. Figure 91. Report format selection page [View full size image]
6.	Leave the default selection of Tabular Report and click Next. You can now choose the fields to include in the report. Some of the fields have been preselected, but you can simply unselect them if you do not want them in this particular report.
7.	Select the following fields for the report: in the Position object, the Position ID (which should already be selected), Days Since Posting, Department, Hiring Manager, Job Description, and Number of Applications; in the Candidate object, the Candidate ID (which should already be checked), First Name, Last Name, and Education. Deselect the Job Application ID field in the Job Application object since this report does not need any information from that object.
8.	Click Next to bring up the page shown below. This page allows you to add standard summary fields to this tabular report. Since you do not have a way to group the records in the report, these summaries are only listed for the entire report. You can have summary values on any numeric or checkbox fields, a sum, average, largest or smallest value for each of these fields, as well as a record count for the records in the report. Figure 92. Standard Report Summary Fields [View full size image]
9.	Select the Record Count option and click Next. The next page allows you to adjust the order in which fields appear in the report.
10.	Change the fields to display in the following order: Department, Position ID, Hiring Manager, Job Description, Days Since Posting, Number of Applications Candidate ID, First Name, Last Name, Education
11.	Click Next to bring up the page shown below. On this page you specify selection criteria for the report. The top section lets you limit the report based on ownership of the records or a date range for any date fields in any of the records in the record type. Figure 93. Select Report Criteria page [View full size image]
12.	Change the Standard Filter for View to All positions, which shows you all records, regardless of owner. The Advanced Filters let you limit the records returned based on field values, or a combination of field values, as illustrated when you click the Advanced Filters link. The third section of this page lets you limit the report to the ‘top’ rows in the report. If you select a number of rows to display—either 10, 25 or any number up to 99—you are prompted for the field on which you want to sort the data, and whether you want to sort in ascending or descending order. The final section gives you the ability to hide the detail rows for the report, an option you also see available in the actual report.
13.	Leave all other options with their default values, as they do not impose any selection conditions, and go directly to the report.
14.	Click Run Report to bring up the page shown in the figure below.

Figure 94. Your first report

[View full size image]

Here it is—your first report. On one hand, it may not be the most beautiful report you have ever seen, but even this simple report packs a load of functionality.

First of all, each of the columns in the report is either a lookup to another object or the name field in an object shown as a link.

You can sort the report by the values in any of the columns by clicking on the column headers.

Report users have a number of options for modifying the report results on this page. They can specify a time frame for the records shown in the report through the same options you had available to you when you designed the report.

You can also see the same four buttons which were present on each of the pages of the report wizard, along with two others: Hide Details, which hides all of the detail rows of the report, and Customize, which takes you back to the wizard pages to change the values.