CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've had some email discussions about this & I thought I would push it onto the forum. Basically we are looking at how to retrieve data from reports in order to display in charts. This breaks the linkage between the report & the chart as we look at alternatives to OpenFlashChart. Xavier has done a lot of work on charting with his civisualize & current expectation is that we will use that to display dashlet reports.

So, the step I am currently focussed on is retrieving report data via the api.

I have had some initial success with this patch https://github.com/eileenmcnaughton/civicrm-core/pull/2

 civicrm_api3('report_template', 'getrows', array('json => 1, 'report_id' => 'contribute/recovery', ' instance_id' =>36);


returns

{
 "is_error":0,
 "version":3,
 "count":2,
 "values":[{
    "from_date":"2011-01-01",
    "to_date":"2011-12-31",
   "recovered":"789",
   "prior":"670"
  },{
  "from_date":"2012-01-01",
  "to_date":"2012-12-31",
  "recovered":"888",
  "prior":"444"}]}

This report is a summary report which means the reported rows are already aggregated. The desire is to transform this data into the chart described here
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviEngage+Enhancements+for+fund-raising#CiviEngageEnhancementsforfund-raising-2.LapsedandRecoveredDonorsChart.

In this example the report is showing what happened to people this year who 'lapsed' last year. Ie. The paid in year 0, didn't pay in year 1 & now we want to know what portion of them came back in year 3 ('recovered') & what portion did not ('prior').  The confusing-ness of the word prior highlights that the api should possibly also return column titles & extra text to be rendered.

Note that the changes to core are only additional functions, setter & getter methods & a couple of conditionals. I would think that this is a candidate for inclusion in 4.4 (but not the release due out this week). I have tested with & without the report instance id as a param  & that works nicely. I have not looked at passing in fields / filters etc yet.

Feedback welcome - comments related to the commits - please add on github. Please discuss here as to how the inputs & outputs of the api work / could be converted to a {crmReport} tag & a graph. Please start your own thread if you discuss the actual report (ie. the specs of it) so this doesn't get hijacked by discussion about the PTP reports specs. (yes, we know some people prefer x graph over y graph)

I support people that prefer x graph over y graph!
I even support people that prefer x+ graph over y+ graph!

X+