Hello List,
Here is something that happened to me a few weeks ago. Thought I would
share that with you.
Still working as a back-up of my colleague for that customer. The
customer contacts me: they urgently need a report “like this one”,
running on the last two weeks. I look at the example they sent me:
doesn't look too bad, it is just a list of records. Which fields from
what Form, as a result of what query, … that I have to find out.
By looking at the columns titles in the report, I guess that the form
must be something related to Quality Feedback or something in that
direction. I scan the list of Forms in the Dev Studio: not easy to find
something, as the Forms are ordered by prefix. Instead of scanning the
list and opening Forms at random, I load the customer's .def file in
ARSmarts. I search on Field Label for what looks like a distinctive name
based on the report's columns titles. Bingo, I find just two Forms that
I need to check. I also immediately check that these Forms are not
included in Join Forms.
Next I open the User Tool (much more convenient than the web interface
to generate reports), and open these two Forms. I quickly find the right
one. Cool. So far, so good.
Then I start to build the report. Looking at what I received from the
customer, I quickly find the first Fields that I must add to the report.
But several fields are nowhere to be found in what I can see in the User
Tool. Well, let's have a look in Dev Studio to see if I find some hidden
Fields that could be candidate to contain the data that is displayed in
that report. After a quick check: no such luck. There are quite a few
hidden fields, but by looking at the names of the Fields, none of them
looks like they could be what I'm looking for.
So I open ARSmarts Data Manager. I connect to the server, open the Form
and run the query that gives me the same result as the example I
received from the customer. There I see all the data fields. I look at
the first record in the report, and so know what data I have to find in
ARSmarts Data Manager. And there they are: a range of fields named
zTmpTextx, with zTmpText1 containing a question and zTmpText2 the
answer, etc. I need to include three answers in the report. I don't know
how long it would have taken me to find this out without the Data Manager.
I can then use the User Tool to build the report in a few minutes.
ARSmarts saved my day once again ;-) ;-).
Thanks for reading me so far.
Kaïs.
kais.albas...@arsmarts.com
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