Custom Reports Library

[SBCTrustee]

Hello Everyone,

I seem to remember a post suggestion that there be some kind of custom report library established such that we PC+ members could draw them down instead of inventing & reinventing the wheel. ( I can't find that post, now). I wonder if that idea is possible.

It seem that there is so much intelligence out there that it would be nice if it could be shared.
Question: Is it possible to port a custom report from one user (not the same church) to another? What file or directory would be involved? Are there any plans to make this happen?

Tom

[jeffkoke]

Great Idea.

Perhaps PowerChurch could find a place to host this?

Jeff

[Zaphod]

Ok then, let's have an informal poll:

By a show of (virtual) hands, who would like to contribute custom reports they've created to a shared online repository?

I'm in favor of the idea myself, but I'd like to get an idea of how successful this sort of thing might be.

[NeilZ]

I would like to see this, but (and I thought I posted this last night .. but then again ... I may have hit the wrong button), with all the customization allowed within the PC+ membership modules, what may work for one church, would be meaningless for another.

Now, I can see where accounting and contributions could be shared, but even then, people have different account setups, etc.

What they could do is show what is available and what can be used as a base for use at your own site.

[foxygramps]

I don't use custom reports, but would if there were some for accounting.
I find the Custom report manual useless for accounting reports, as all it covers is membership. I'm sure that modifying an existing custom report would be fairly simple.

[Zaphod]

with all the customization allowed within the PC+ membership modules, what may work for one church, would be meaningless for another.

That's true to some degree, but I don't think it's a dealbreaker, per se. We did a lot of talking about this yesterday here, and the general consensus is that the folks who would use these would be people who already have enough knowledge of custom reports to modify an existing one. We were thinking in terms of embedded logos and things like that. In most cases, I think slight tweaks to record filters would be enough, or if reports were designed with the option to specify selections at run time, that would work well too.

Foxygramps - all the references for Custom Reports use the Membership information just as an example. The concepts are the same for accounting. You select records, output fields, etc. exactly the same way.

[SBCTrustee]

Hello Everyone,

Since I started this conversation, let me shoot myself in the foot a little. I am only a techie want to be. I believe that if I saw how others solved various problems with custom reports then I might be able to use some of their methods to solve some of our needs.

With that said, what are the dangers of virus & bad stuff like that in a sharring envirnment?

I know that we are Church People but.......


Tom

[wms7328]

I would be glad to share the few custom reports I have written. I agree with the person that said more examples of others reports might help me with some of the ones I'm trying.

One hot item for me is how to show the current accounting month on a report. I've found a function cmonth() but the argument inside the () is not identified and so far have not been able to figure out what to use.

Anyway, that just one example of things I might be able to get from others reports.

[Jeff]

Cmonth is a function that returns the character month of a date expression. For example CMONTH(DATE(2005,6,1)) will return "June."

Let me start by saying custom reports in fund accounting can be very difficult. You are limited to very simple reports. We have hundreds of lines of code we use to create things like the balance sheet and income & expense statements. Trying to recreate those reports in the custom reports is not practical.

That said though, I assume you are looking for the month range that was entered when going in to the custom reports in fund accounting. Those months are stored as a two fiscal month objects and I just checked are still in scope during the report layout.

1. Add a field object to the report layout.
2. In the expression enter the following:

Code: Select all

m.pofrom.getchardate() + ' - ' + m.poto.getchardate()

If you added the field object to the title band, you should now have the text like "January 2005 - June 2005" on the top of your report. Keep in mind this is a very advanced topic and because you are referencing internal variables in the program, this may change in future version of PowerChurch Plus.

[jeffkoke]

Hello Everyone,

With that said, what are the dangers of virus & bad stuff like that in a sharring envirnment?

Tom

Tom,

Well, the statements used to generate custom reports are basically ASCII text. So, it is extremely remote (IMO) that a virual infection could occur.

I would recommend that only the content of the person's custom report be uploaded to the forum.

If PC allowed posting of a file, I suppose there could be a factor of a virus attaching itself to the file. So, running it though a scanner prior to allowing the post might make sense.

Any comments, Zaphod?

Make sense?
Jeff

[NeilZ]

I would think that PowerChurch would segregate any such uploads, and then scan and test them prior to releasing to the public to insure that they don't compromise their systems.

[Zaphod]

What'll end up happening, as I currently plan it, would be a report would be submitted, and we would perform the most rudimentary of checks on it to make sure that it is indeed a custom report. A virus scan would be a defacto part of that process.

[gtackett]

I'll add my name to the list of "Yes" on the shared custom reports.

[Dish-Man]

can you use the pre-defined reports already written in the software and modify them to create your own custom report? Seems like it would be helpful to see the code used to generate the standard PowerChurch reports and get ideas for customizing your own report. If so, how would you get them into the Report Writer?

[gtackett]

can you use the pre-defined reports already written in the software and modify them to create your own custom report?

I believe I have seen some posts from the PowerChurch tech support in this forum indicating that you can't do this.