Best practice forum (Archived)

Report source tables - overview

No doubt this is discussed somewhere here but I've only found tangential topics so far.

It would be extremely useful to have a list of report sources for creating custom reports - ie what tables and fields (columns) are included in the sources and how (if at all) one could add new sources directly the database - all I see is a message saying I can't configure this through the admin interface.

At the moment I can only view the components of sources by tedious trawling through the sources one by one.

There is a third-party block for Moodle called Configurable Reports - this would be a useful addition to Totara.

Thanks

Richard

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Richard,

I would love to give this a plus one! If there were some sort of repostory of report sources that we could draw on that would be extremly helpfull. I would like to see more development in this area as well as the built in report sources just dont meet all of our needs at the current moment. We are also using Configurable Reports but would rather see this function built directly into the totara functionality.

Thanks for the request and i look forward into more of what Totara can provide!

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PLUS ONE from me, as well.

Besides Columns, it should also define each Source's:

Available Filters (as these are often different than the list of columns offered)
Content control capabilities (at what level, e.g. show only based org, report, position, etc.)
Access control capabilities

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Jumping on this band wagon too. Have been very frustrated with the available choices in the filters. Have managed to get some added but only by logging a request to host. Currently having to do some time consuming merging of excel files to get data.

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In terms of new report sources it would be helpful if people could let us know the kinds of report sources they need that aren't currently included (or additional columns or filters on existing sources).

The most useful format for us to understand what you need is to provide a list of the column headings, as well as a description of what a single row would represent. So for example the current "course completion" report source is:

User | Course | Completion Status

with one row representing a single user's status in a particular course.

Also, if anyone has commissioned any custom report sources do let us know about them - we would encourage sharing of new sources and are open to including them in core Totara if they seem useful and meet our coding guidelines.

Simon

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Hi, Simon

I think it would be useful to have a source similar to Course Completion and Course Completion by Organisation so that hierarchy fileds like Position and Organisation can be included with Course Completion information. I cannot seem to find a source that has both e.g. shows a user, their position and org with the course completion data like course completion date, progress etc.

My example would be:

Hope that makes some sense.

Cheers!

Tom

P.S. If you could point me in the direction of where I could find more information on creating sources, I would be happy to try and do something for sharing purposes and possible integration into core.

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Hi Tom,

The normal "Course completion" report source does that! In fact there are two types of columns - org/pos of the user at the time they completed the activity, and also "User's position/organisation" which is the current position/organsition of that user.

Regarding documentation there is some information about creating report sources here:

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/reportbuilder

and there's a webinar I gave on the subject here:

http://youtu.be/BwG5-4zsUlA

and the presentation notes from that session here:

https://kineo-pacific.box.com/s/3zzheai1ijx5lgk9gn5u

Simon

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Thank you, simon. You're a legend!

Cheers

Tom

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Hi Richard,

Currently, if you want to get a list of available sources the best way is to go to "Manage Reports" and look at the list of options in the pulldown menu. I agree it would be good to have a help page detailing what each of this reports is for - I will point our documentation team at this thread and hopefully they can write something.

In terms of describing every column and filter that each source includes though that may be a bit problematic - there are about 500 columns and 250 in the current code and that's changing all the time as we continue to extend various reports, so my concern is that very detailed lists would get out of date quickly.

In terms of adding new column or filter options, this does have to be done in the code in report builder since knowledge of SQL is required to know how to tell the system the information required to generate the report.

The configurable reports block will work in Totara so you are welcome to install it in your site. We don't tend to include 3rd party modules in Totara since then we would need to provide support for their code.

Simon

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