If you are familiar with the Report Designer in Chris21 you will know that the sheer size of the available list of reports can be very difficult to manage. You can categorise your Chris21 reports to greatly reduce this problem.
I recently wrote a post entitled Chris21 Reports – How to Manage Your List. This will give you some background information about the issue.
The concept of categorising reports is a simple one. You create the categories that you want to use and then assign a category for each report you write. Over time, as you write more and more reports, your list of reports will grow. However, since you have categorised your reports, you will be able to apply a Quick Filter to display your reports by category, rather than showing the complete list.
How to Categorise Your Chris21 Reports
The first thing you need to do is ensure your categories have been setup in Chris21. To do this, you need to add them to the Report Designer Category (NWCAT) table in Chris21. You will need access to the Tables (TAB) form in Chris21 to do this. You may need assistance from your System Administrator for this.
The categories can be anything you choose to a maximum of 12 characters. For instance, you could categorise by Payroll, Leave, HR21, Training, Positions, End of Year, Administration, etc. The more categories you use, the easier it will be to find your reports in the future.
A typical Report Designer Category table might look like this:
Assuming that you already have some reports that you have previously written, you will want to assign these to the appropriate categories. To do this, open the Report Designer and select the report you want to categorise. Double click on the report from your list and then click the Options tab:
Select the category you want to assign to this report from the Category drop down table:
After you have chosen a category remember to Save your report. Do this for all of the existing reports that you want to categorise.
Now that all of your reports have been categorised you will be able to apply a Quick Filter to filter your list by category. To do this, go back to the full list of reports by clicking the Choose Design tab at the bottom of the Report Designer window. At this stage you may need to refresh your reports list to pick up the changes you made to categories. Simply click the Refresh button from the menu:
You will notice in the list above that your reports will now have the specific categories assigned. You can now use the Quick Filter to filter your reports by Category and make them easier to find. In the screenshot below I have filtered the list to show only reports that have been categorised as Payroll. See my blog Using Quick Filters in Chris21 if you need more help with this.
That’s all you need to do to categorise your Chris21 reports. Now that this is set up you just need to remember to categorise your new reports as you write them. As your list of reports grows your categories will make them much easier to find.