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CREATING A NEW WINDWARD REPORT#

Objectives#

1. Create a new Departmental Birthday report
2. Add a parameter to select a specific month
3. Add a lexicon to the month parameter
4. Create a Department Head Count report (based on RENA)

In this demonstration, the application server will be ARGO and the EP instance AS01. These values will need to be altered to reflect your specific environment.

Creating a Birthday Report#

IMFN#

1. Create a new function for this report.
   
   Any report run from within ePersonality must be defined as a function in the IMFN screen. The first two reports will be retrieving data from the HR tables only and is similar to the RENA report.
   
   
2. Enter REBR for the function name and add a description for this report.
   
   This demonstration will create a report named REBR. This follows our standard report naming convention. The 'R' indicates a read only report. This will not make any changes to existing data within the database. 'E' represents it is a member of the HR employee module, and 'BR' is an abbreviation for a Birthday Report.
   
   Since this report is displaying employee information only, it should be part of the HR prod¬uct group.
   
   
3. Set the following fields:
   • Function Type to ‘Report’
   • Usage to ‘User Defined’
   • Computer Language to ‘Winward’
   • Where Run to ‘Windward’
   • Destination Format to ‘PDF’
     
     PDF is the only supported output format at the time this demonstration was written.
     
     
4. Add at least one user or role that will have execution rights to the new report.
   
   Adding P2K_MASTER will allow P2K to run the report. If this report will prompt to users to enter parameters, both the Retrieve Allowed and Update Allowed toggles must be turned on.

IMFDH#

After the function has been defined in IMFN, go to the IMFDH screen. This screen defines the report parameter screen layout as well as all the tables the report needs access to.

Table Usage tab

1. Add P2K_AM_EXECUTIONS in the Data Source field and set the Where Clause field to ‘NEW MEX ID ONLY’
2. Add P2K_HR_ASSIGNMENT_DETAILS in the Data Source field
3. Set the Table Usage field to ‘User Defined’ for both of these tables.
4. If you are creating a report that is accessing the same table twice for different information the Table Alias and Join Clause fields are required for the second occurrence of the table.

Form Layout tab

Since we will be adding parameters to the report at a later time, we can ignore the Form Layout tab. This tab is used to define what parameters and filters are presented to the user and where they appear when the report is launched.

Menu/Drill Downs tab

The Menu/Drill Downs tab will be used later to add our report to the HR menu. During development and testing of the report we will simply run the report from the command windows within EP.

Report Template#

Once the function and form definition has been saved, a report template will need to be created.

• Open MS Word and create a new Rich Text Format RTF document named REBR.rtf. This file is case sensitive; the file name must be in uppercase while the extension must be lowercase.

Before adding any fields with Auto Tag, create the basic layout of your report.

• Create a title for the new report and insert a table to format the column headings and data of the report. The table only needs to contain three rows with five columns each. Our report will contain the employee name, person code, gender, birth date and age. The entire second row will be blank to provide space between these headings and the data.

Once the basic report layout has been created, define its XML structure using the Data/Data Sources of the Auto Tag menu. This report data source will need to be added as XML (file or URL) with the following URL:
http://argo.highlinecorp.com/selfService_AS01/reportdatastructure?NAME=REBR This is an example using the AS01 instance in High Line's ARGO application server. The application server and instance name will need to be changed to point to a local environment.

The extension on this URL NAME=REBR is used to identify which tables the report will have access to. Each function will have access to a different set of tables as defined in the IMFDH screen earlier.

Once the XML data source has been defined, Auto Tag will have access to these tables as well as:

• P2K_AM_EXECUTIONS (MEX)
• P2K_AM_EXECUTION_RUN_LOGS (MRL)
• No InterWiki reference defined in properties for Wiki called "P2K_AM_USERS (MUS) *[P2K_AM_FUNCTIONS (MFN) *[P2K_AM_SITES (MST) These five tables are added to the data source of all reports generated by High Line and the items within them can be used in the report in the same way as any other item. If the data source provided to the template only contains one piece of information, it can simply be added to the report using an OUT tag. However, most reports will need to display several rows of information, sorted by one or more items. In this situation, a FOREACH tag will be needed to look through the data to display all the rows that pass the selection criteria defined within ePersonality. The Birthday Report needs to group all the employees for a department together and then present these employees alphabetically within each department. This will require two FOREACH tags to define this sort order correctly. Every FOREACH tag requires an END tag to close it. Failing to add an END tag will cause the report to generate an error when it's processed. Trouble shooting this type of error can be very difficult to do. It is recommended that an END tag be placed in your template immediately after creating a FOREACH tag to ensure each one has a corresponding end. The basic layout of this template will be"!, but there can be XLSX and DOCX as well. During the installation and configuration of the Oracle Application Server, a copy of these files would have been placed in the REPORTS folder under the HLAppResources directory used by each ePersonality instance.

Since most users will not have access to the application server, a copy of the RTF template will need to be downloaded to your client system for editing. We will upload this template each time it's needed for testing purposes. Once a final copy of the RTF template is ready, it can be moved into another directory that is used for custom reports. We will use the RENA.rtf file as our starting point and modify this. Extract a copy of the file from High Line's ZIP file and rename it to RENAC.rtf. After Windward's Auto Tag plug in has been installed, the license key entered and the report template has been placed on the client system, open the RTF file. After opening, the first change that will be needed is to define the data source for this report. From the Auto Tag menu, select Data/Data Sources. In the dialog box that appears, select the XML data source listed and click edit. If no data source is listed, simply click the add button. Ensure the vendor field is XML (file or url) and edit the File/URL field to point to the fol¬lowing URL: http://argo.highlinecorp.com/selfService_AS01/reportdatastructure?NAME=RENAC Please note the URL shown above is an example only. You will need to alter this URL to point to your application server and Self Service instance. This URL is another entry point into the Self Service component of High Line's ePersonality application. This URL simply provides the XML format of the data that will be provided to the Windward report engine when the specified function is run. Auto Tag requires a data structure to provide a list of item that can be added to the report from its Data Bin. Before exiting the Data Sources Edit dialog, press the Test button in the lower left to ensure Auto Tag is able to communicate with the URL specified. If communication is not successful you will not be able to edit the report template correctly. Once communication has been established pressing OK will return you to the Data Sources. The list of items shown in the data sources dialog should now contains several table aliases that can be expanded. If the EASD table is not listed edit the data source again and correct the URL. If the URL is correct ensure the function has been saved correctly within the appli¬cation. The EASD entry will include all the database columns associated to the P2K_HR_ASSIGNMENT_DETAILS table. Within this list of items is EAS_ID. Expanding this item will display all the columns associated to the P2K_HR_ASSIGNMENTS table. From this list we can continue to navigate up the data hierarchy to P2K_HR_EMPLOYMENTS and again to P2K_HR_IDENTITIES. Using this method of data navigation we can also branch out to other tables for department information, unit and group data, as well and the employee's personal information. Many of the field tags added to the template file by High Line will be visible in the report template. However most will not produce any output in the actual report. The only tags that produce output when run are <OUT> tags. Simply placing the mouse over a tag should display a tool tip for that tag. Since many of the tags created in the RENA report are larger than the cell that has been defined to display the data, the template may not look like the final report. For example, the start of the <OUT> tags for the employee information is at the top of page three in the RTF file but will actually print at the top of page two. To remove the Termination date and Status code, highlight the column label and the <OUT> tag that corresponds to these fields and press delete. Alternately you can place your cursor at the end of this line and simply back space to remove the tags and field labels. Type a label for the new field we will be adding. In this example, we will label this Gender and then add the GENDER tag from the Auto Tag data bin. To add this tag you will need to expand the EASD table alias. This will display all the columns in the ASSIGNMENT DETAILS table. Expanding the EAS_ID item will display all the columns associated to ASSIGNMENTS. Expanding the EEM_ID item will display the EMPLOYMENT columns. Finally expanding the EID_ID item will display the columns in the IDENTITIES table, includ¬ing GENDER. Click and drag this item onto our report next to the label that was typed in earlier. Save the report and connect to ePersonality as a user authorized to run RENA. Once connected type RENA in the command window, or select it from the report drop down menu. Since this function was extended earlier in the IMFN screen, running RENA will actually run RENAC. Fill in any parameters you like to limit the number of people included in the report and then go to the Report Options tab of the report parameter screen. In this tag click the folder icon next to the 'Upload Template' line. In the file upload dialog box that appears, navigate to the copy of the RENAC.rtf file you have altered and open it. This will place the file name into the Upload Template field. Click the Launch button to run your report. If there are no errors in the RTF file the report progress bar will display feedback as the report runs. When your report completes, click on the Output link to display the PDF output. You can confirm that your template was using by scrolling down to any employee and confirming that both the Term and Status fields have been replaced by the employee's gender. The next step is to alter the data that is presented to the new template for reporting. This is not controlled by either the template or Windward. Instead, altering this will need to be done within your ePersonality environment. Each report that has a subject table defined within its IMFN screen must have an entry in the IMLQ to build a report list. Since RENAC has the P2K_HR_ASSIGNMENT_DETAILS table defined for its subject table, there must be an entry within IMLQ with an LOV name of IMPV_RENAC. EP will look for an entry that starts with IMPV_ followed by the function name of the report. The Query Text defined in the IMLQ entry is a simple SQL select statement that will build a list of assignment detail ID's that are passed to our report. By altering this SQL statement we can change the quantity of data that will be processed by the report. The SQL statement provided by High Line is:

The new statement is:

The only difference in these two statements is the addition of:

This sub-query will restrict the records reported to only employees that have an employment status of ACTIVE, REGULAR or PROBATIONARY. This will eliminate all terminated and inactive employees from our report. The final step to complete this report is to add the report to the application server, removing the need to upload the template each time we want to run the report. In order to add the report to the application server our custom RTF file will need to be moved into the UserDefined directory in HLAppResources/reports. This will require a user with write permission in this directory. We can test this again by running the RENAC report and not uploading our modified version. The Windward report engine should pick up the new template from this directory and run successfully.

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Notes#

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