CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Brian,

I think that's a definite improvement. One annoyance currently is that when you go to save a report you stay on the template url you created the report from rather than being directed to your newly created report

An area that would be good to look in more depth the fields selection. My feeling is that a nice, searchable multi-select object would be the way to go. Views does something a bit like this. I played a bit with it when figuring out how to make custom fields from multiple contacts available (e.g  activity report gives source contact - I wanted source, target & assignee, similar for relationship). I couldn't find a widget that did a good job of allowing filtering AND allowed the report creator to re-order the fields so I settled for the CiviCRM multiselect (which gave me field ordering but not filtering). Extending the CiviCRM multiselect to provide filtering would be helpful in multiple places - eg. on advanced search screen. As you can see from the screen shots I only put custom fields into the selector but that wasn't a design choice, is was a scope thing.

If there was a decent field selector widget would that slot into your existing design?

Do you have any better ideas about how to incorporate the same fields from multiple contacts on the report (from a UI point of view)?

A separate area of consideration is how to deal with 'not-really-filters'. I've seen examples elsewhere but the current example I am working on is for PTP where they want criteria in the filter section that aren't really filters - ie. "Number of periods to show" This is a report criteria but not a filter.

Lastly, your mock-up doesn't have a button / switcher for showing which format to display (pie chart, bar chart tab).

And extra lastly, another thing I have implemented on some reports is the ability to select WHICH contact to add to a group (individual or employer off a contact report, giver or honor contact off a contribution report). Might be worth having in the back of your head that 'add to group' should at some point be supported by another field saying which contact is affected.

(NB all the things I have been playing with are in the extended report extension & some are described here

http://civicrm.org/blogs/eileen/getting-data-out-civi-extending-reports)