Using Active Reports to Create Active Panels

By Adam Lotrowski

Since its debut in March 2006, Active Reports has evolved from another report output type to a whole new way of reporting. The PDF Layout Painter is used to develop Active Panels that bundle multiple Active Reports into various scenarios that are then coordinated together by a common sort field.

In the next release of WebFOCUS, you will be able to develop Active Panels in the HTML Layout Painter too. Active Panels are best suited to develop storyboards, including multiple charts and tables, which give the user a complete view of the business issue. The panels can be sent to users as standalone dashboard pages or be incorporated in corporate dashboards.

A typical use case is to display different scenarios, such as regional sales and product sales, each on their own “page” within the Active Panels, as shown in Figure 1, so that users can quickly switch from one scenario to another by clicking on each of the tabs.

Figure 1 illustrates three Active Panels scenario layouts:

  1. Revenue report
  2. Regional report
  3. Product report.

 

The Active Panels are universally filtered by the region field, represented by the dropdown at the top of the report. Every type of Active Report visualization is being demonstrated: the pie, line and bar chart, tabular report and pivot table. Lastly, paging through each of the layout buttons in the upper-left corner will present each reporting scenario filtered by region.

Developing Active Panels

Active Panels simply builds on users’ previous knowledge of Active Reports and integrates it with the PDF Layout Painter’s Coordinated Compound Report.

  • Active Reports with a common primary sort field are embedded into compound document.
  • Each page layout of the compound document appears as a separate tab at the top of the Active Panel and represents a different business scenario.
  • The common primary sort field is used to merge all the reports for cross-scenario and cross-report filtering.

WebFOCUS 7.6.2 boasts a number of Active Reports enhancements, including the ability to set an Active Report’s initial presentation style. This allows Active Reports to render by default as a report, pivot table, or chart. With these three types of visualizations packaged into the Active Report output type, Active Reports can now be integrated with Coordinated Compound Reports presenting reports, pivot tables and charts all within the same page.

Steps to Create Active Panels

  1. Active Report preparation:

    All Active Reports designated for Active Panels must have the same primary sort field. This can be from multiple Master File Descriptions, though the primary sort field must be the same name and format. In other words, each Active Report procedure must have the same first BY field.

    In addition, each Active Report’s initial presentation style should be set to a grid report, pivot table or chart type.
  1. Compound document configuration:

    In the PDF Layout Painter’s compound document, set the property coordinate report to “On” and the Output format to “Active Report.”
  2. Active Report object positioning:

    Once all Active Reports have been imported and/or referenced, all a user must do is position the Active Report objects into their respective “pages.” Each page will correspond to a different scenario represented with multiple Active Report objects.

The final result is Active Panels, a visual analytic tool that universally binds multiple Active Reports into separate scenarios that can be paged through. And since all the reports are a type of Active Report, they each retain their own individual single menu functionality, pivoting or charting capabilities. This allows each Active Report to be modified and saved individually or as the entire Active Panel, which produces a smal portable HTML file.

There are a number of other innovative features to Active Reports, such as annotations, which we encourage you to try and which will be discussed in a separate article. We will also follow up in a future newsletter with an article on how to develop Active Panels in the HTML Layout Painter.