Detail Export Report

About the Detail Export Report
The detail export facility allows admins to run reports on standard and custom forms to see at a glance the data which matters most to them. It also provides the ability to export some or all of your data to industry standard CSV format (supported on import by Excel among many other programs).

Accessing the Detail Export Report
You find the Detail Export Report under the Admin menu where it is linked via "DetailExport".

On entry
The report has three tabs. You start at the Report_options tab where you can define any of three report templates initially named default_1, default_2,and default_3. We recommend that you change the name to something that makes sense to you. You may also select the output format of either html (returns a web page) or csv (provides excel and export download).

Click the Finish_options if you make any changes. On the first time you select any of the 3 templates, proceed to the Ordering_record_fields tab. Otherwise if you have not made any changes and have already set up the record fields, you may skip to Select_records.

Ordering Record Fields
The system searches all your forms and lists all of the fields you may include in your report. It is highly unlikely that the fields are in the order you prefer so you may move fields up and down in the listing.

There is a solid dark blur bar in the listing. Fields above the bar are included in the order listed where the top field shows up as leftmost column in the report. Fields below the bar are not included.

Nothing prevents you from including every field but the resulting report may be unreadably squeezed to fit on your screen. On the other hand, if you are export to csv (Excel), then you may decide to just export all fields and trim what you work with inside the recipient program.

You may may move fields up and down by respectively clicking the "up" and "dn" buttons.

The "taken_utc" field is merely stored as UTC time. What is actually listed is converted to your local time zone so don't let the"utc" in the field name rattle you.

The screen shot taken is from a relatively "virgin" account, one that has never selected the last two accounts. The listing shows "default_2" and "default_3". After defining those templates, the field in them will be listed. This allows you to see at a glance what the order is for each template so that you can coordinate the ordering among templates.

By default, the message number field is selected. We strongly recommend you include it. the record number is sequential and not duplicated. If you run this report on, say, a weekly basis, each set of message numbers should start off where the previous week's numbers ended. This provides a check that you have all the records and no duplicates. Note, however, if you delete any messages, there will be a hole in the message number sequence for every deleted message.

Selecting records
There is a flexible record select. You can select a range of days, minutes, hours, weeks, months, or years. Often, this is the only select you want.

Note that times are converted to base minutes to form the search range. Thus, 0-1 days searches between now and 86,400 (=24*60*60) minutes ago. You may get matches from both today and yesterday. In the same way, 2 to 4 hours ago searches between 120 and 240 minutes ago.

You may also select on field values in your messages.

At the conclusion of the search, you will get an intermediate page to either run your report using the selected messages or to re-run the select.

Report Output
Since we selected csv for this report on the report_options page, we get the csv output page. There is a large "download_to_excel" link which downloads the csv file. Depending on how your system is set up, you may get a dialog offering to download the file or run it. You may also have the report open directly in Excel.

For small files under 15 records, the entire csv file is also returned below the download_to_excel link. For larger files only the first 5 and last 5 records are listed.

Working with Excel
In our Windows 10 system, the csv file opens directly in Excel with no intervention. It is necessary to adjust the column widths. If we copy/pasted this into a running spreadsheet, we would not have to even do that after we set the column widths the first time.