CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Civi's report system is actually broken up into two layers -- ReportTemplates provide code and define overall structure/behavior/layout (e.g. "join data from the contact table, membership table, and contribution table"). ReportInstances provide specific options to feed into the templates (eg "display the first name and last name but skip the middle name, and sort by ID"). However, when speaking informally, we might say "Report" without clarifying whether we mean ReportTemplate or ReportInstance.

The  "civix generate:report" command produces a ReportTemplate. The ReportTemplate is registered using the *.mgd.php file (and it does require a system.flush or reinstall to load). However, to see/use a report, one must also create a ReportInstance. The typical way is to navigate to "Reports =>All Reports => New Report".

(Aside: It should be possible to register a ReportInstance using an *.mgd.php file and the ReportInstance API, but this would imply that the ReportInstance should always be there. But the intention of the whole template/instance split is that admins can add/remove/tweak instances.)