Report Options Dialog

Overview

Once you have selected a report from the Reports menu, you will see a dialog which lets you configure how the report will be run. At the top of the dialog, there is a drop down menu which shows the report you have selected. If you selected the wrong report by mistake, you could change your mind and choose a different one from this menu.

Subject

If you simply selected a report from the main reports menu, you will see “All Entries” here. However, if you right-clicked a parameter, you will see the name of that entry. Also, if you selected multiple parameters, you will see something like “Selected Computers”, and the “Aggregated” checkbox will be enabled. If you check it, then all the things you selected will be combined into a single entry in the report results, as opposed to being kept separate.

Date Range

Below that is an area labeled Date Range. When it is appropriate, reports allow you to report on only a specific interval of time, as opposed to the entire span of time currently recorded in the usage database. However, some reports are not “time-based”, so it would not make sense to select a certain interval of time, and the items in this area will be greyed out. Generally speaking, the shorter an interval you select, the faster a report will run. The drop down menu in the Date Range section contains the following choices:

• Entire Data Set - the report will use the entire range of data which is present in the usage database, whatever it happens to be.
• This Year - the report will use data starting on the first day of the year, and continuing until the present time.
• This Quarter - the report will use data starting on the first day of the current quarter (January 1, April 1, July 1, or October 1), and continuing until the present time.
• This Month - the report will use data starting on the first day of the current month, and continuing until the present time.
• This Week - the report will use data starting at 12 AM in the morning on the previous Sunday and continuing until the present time.
• Today - the report will use data starting at 12 AM this morning and continuing until the present time.
• Last Year - the report will use data starting on the first day of last year, and ending on the last day of last year.
• Last Quarter - the report will use data starting on the first day of the last quarter and ending on the last day of last quarter.
• Last Month - the report will use data starting on the first day of the last month, and continuing until the last day of last month.
• Last Week - the report will use data starting at 12 AM in the morning of two Sundays ago, and ending at 12 AM in the morning on the previous Sunday.
• Yesterday - the report will use data starting at 12 AM yesterday morning and ending at 12AM this morning.
• Custom - this will enable the two text areas below the menu, marked From and To, which will let you type in specific dates and times. The From field will automatically be filled in with the earliest time which is found in the usage database. The To field initially contains now - therefore if you do not change either parameter, this is equivalent to selecting Entire Data Set.

Note that if you select a date range, run the report, and then right-click an item in the report and run a second report using the item as a parameter, the selected time range will be carried over to the second report. For example, if you run Usage (COMP x prog) with the date range This Week, then right-click a program in the report called “MyApp”, and select the Usage (PROG x user) report, you will get Usage (MyApp x user), also restricted to this week.

Time Sets

If you have defined Time Sets, you can apply them to most usage based reports. They will either become the top-level groups or the innermost detail, depending on whether you check the “Group time sets at innermost level” option. Suppose you have defined a “Working hours” time set that includes 9-5 Monday through Friday. One way you might use this is to check just this time set, and do not check the checkbox. Then you will see the same report results as usual except that only usage within that time set will be included. On the other hand, suppose you also select “Unspecified times”, and you DO group at innermost level. Then you will get the same report as usual, except that you will see an additional level of detail that will allow you to compare usage during Working hours to usage outside of working hours (“Unspecified times”).

External Data Sources

KeyConfigure also gives you the ability to run the internal reports against an external datasource using an appropriate ODBC driver (installed on the KeyConfigure host -Windows or Macintosh) for the target external SQL server. You might want to use this feature if you have a very large site with a lot of usage data. With a huge data set exported to a powerful external database server, queries may perform more quickly than when these queries are targeted to the KeyServer itself.

The Options button in the lower left of the Report configuration dialog will open a second dialog box which will let you choose an ODBC DSN to use for the internal reports. Please note that this option is remembered between reports! Once you choose a DSN, all internal reports (at least those run from KeyConfigure on this computer) will use this DSN until you come back to this dialog and revert to internal data. The Report Options dialog contains two radio buttons - Direct from KeyServer, which configures internal reports to use internal data, and Through ODBC, which configures internal reports to use the DSN which you specify. If you select Through ODBC, you must select a DSN which is present on the computer which is running KeyConfigure. Either type the name (if you are sure you know it), or click the Browse button, which will bring up the system interface for selecting a data source. The chosen data source should of course point to the target database which KeyServer exports to.

Note that even if you are using an external data source for KeyConfigure's internal reports, you will still be able to double click on line items in the reports and jump immediately to the corresponding computer and program detail records in KeyConfigure - the KeyConfigure report behavior is exactly the same regardless of whether the report is querying exported data or KeyServer's internal databases.

Report Descriptions

For a full description of each report, see Reports.

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