The purpose of this article is to provide you with a step-by-step process to add growth to your custom report in DotActiv Software using grids and calculated columns.
Applicable Products: DotActiv Enterprise.
Prerequisites
In order to add growth to a custom report, you will need to set up a Data Cube to use as the custom report data source. The Data Cube can be built using either your database, or a CSV. However, it cannot be set up using a planogram as a planogram only contains a single data period.
Please note that when using a CSV as a data source, the data can only be retrieved if the user is connected to the local server.
In order to report on growth, your Data Cube must include two unique periods.
The Process Of Reporting Growth
Step 1: Create a Data Cube within DotActiv.
- Setup Data Source and Fields:
The above example uses a database as the data source for the data cube. For more information on setting up data cubes within DotActiv, read this article.
When creating your Data Cube, in order to report growth, it is important to remember that when selecting the periods for your Data Cube you should have two unique periods, and when adding the “Period” fields, you only require the field named “Period” and not “From Date”, or “To Date”. The next step illustrates how to do this within DotActiv.
Step 2: Set up two unique periods for your Data Cube and run the Data Cube.
- Select Period to use:
The above example uses the latest 3 periods, and by selecting “Also Pull 12 Periods Prior” we will also get data for the same period 1 year prior. This will result in a year on year report of growth for the period selected.
If you want to report month on month, you would select 1 period i.e. the period you want to report growth for, and then select “Also pull 1 period prior”. The same method can be used to report on growth from your latest fiscal quarter to the fiscal quarter prior.
2. Adding the “Period” field to our existing fields:
After the period has been selected, we add the “Period” field to our fields. This field is what we will use in our calculated columns in the custom report to create our growth fields. As mentioned before, we only require the “Period” field and not the “From Date” or “To Date”.
Now that we have set up our Data Cube, we can move on to setting up the custom report and use a grid to report growth within the custom report.
Step 3: Setup Custom Report with a Grid that uses calculated columns to report growth.
- Setup Custom Report, add a Grid, and set up Fields:
2. Select calculated columns in grid properties:
3. Setup growth fields under “Grouping Calculations”.
As you can see from the above image, when setting up growth you will use “Calculated Columns” in your grid properties, and create a growth field for each field you wish to report growth for.
The most important part of the above step is when adding the fields using “Set Columns” in your grid set up, your “Data Group Fields” field should be the “Period” field that was set up when creating the data cube. Without this field, the data will not be separated by each period, and the growth set up in calculated columns will not work.
For more information about building a custom report, and setting up grids within custom reports, refer to the links attached.
Now we can generate a custom report and view the results.
Step 4: Generate Report and view results.
- Generate a report and examine results:
As you can see in the above example, the growth has been calculated successfully and the results can be analysed.
Should the above steps not work for you, please create a support ticket and DotActiv support will assist you in uncovering the issue.