The solution I usually go to is to create reports that link the employee table with the position table. This way, you can extract powerful reports that will show both the employee details along with the position details. The position details are things such as organisation levels, standard hours per week, position status, plus many other fields that are there for reporting purposes.

If you want more information about position linking and want to give it a try, see my blog Linking Files in Chris21 Reports.

But there is a way to grab fields from other files (with different parent keys), and without having to link the files. Read on…

Creating Position Reports Without File Linking

When it comes to position reports in Chris21, you have another option which doesn’t involve file linking. In this case, you can access inbuilt hidden Position Table (PDT) fields that are included on the Position (POS) file. There is a limited number of these fields, but in many cases, they will provide the detail you are looking for in your report.

You access these hidden fields by using the Field Chooser when creating your report. From the Field Chooser, hit F6 and enter POS to view the Position form. From here, you drag the fields that you want into your report. The fields from PDT that you want in your report won’t show up on POS, so you have to go to the list of all fields to find the ones you want.

Finding Hidden Fields

To do this, at the bottom of the Field Chooser click the All Fields tab. You will see a list of POS fields, in this list are the available hidden fields from PDT.

From here it is just a matter of finding the fields that you want and then double click to add to your report. For instance, if you want organisation level fields, look for the fields POS L0 CD – POS L9 CD. These cover the 10 available organisation levels. If you have, for example, an organisation level 4 called Department and you want to view it in your report, add the field POS L4 CD.

When you save and run your report, you will see your organisation level 4 in your report so that you can identify each employee and what department they belong to.

With this information, you can add other fields to you report, such as salary, and then publish to Excel. Once in Excel, you can filter by department or sort and create totals by department to show total salaries by department.

As I mentioned, the available hidden fields are limited so you can’t extract every field from PDT into your position report. When you can’t find the field you need your only option will be to link the POS and PDT files.

Give this a try as an alternative to linking files. You may find it a simpler approach to file linking with the same results. It can be a complicated topic, let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

The post How to Create Position Reports in Chris21 Without File Linking appeared first on System Logic.

In this blog I want to go into a bit more detail about how and why the Chris21 report writer uses file linking.

Firstly, why would you need to link files? To answer this I need to explain a little bit about the file structure in Chris21. There are parent types associated with files. For example, the parent for employee related information is EM. You may be familiar with some of the file names:

• EMDET is the file for employee Details (DET)
• EMPOS is the file for employee Position details (POS)
• EMADR is the file for employee Addresses details (ADR)

Another parent type is PS. This is the parent for position based information. For example:

• PSDET is the file for Position Table (PDT)
• PSSKL is the file for Position Skills (PSK)

Using the file examples above, you create position records in Chris21 using PDT. You then assign positions to employees from the list of PDT records, thereby creating POS records. Therefore PDT and POS numbers always match and this is how Chris21 can establish the file linking. These matching values are called Pointers.

You will need to link files if you want to include information from more than one parent type in a single report. For instance, you may want to run a report over POS but include some of the data that is held on PDT.

In my many years working with Chris21 I would say that reports linking POS and PDT are by far the most common. However, it is worth bearing in mind that you can link across other file parent types, such as Awards and Salaries or training Courses and training History.

An example of when you would want to link files in your reports

For this example I will stay with the positions file linking scenario. As mentioned, this is likely to be the one you will use most often. Let’s say you were creating a report to extract details from POS but in that report you wanted to include the Organisation Level 3 field from PDT. There are two fields that create the link, Position Number from POS and Position Number from PDT. For more detail about this part of the process I refer you again to my blog Linking Files in Chris21 Reports.

After you have created the link, the report output will show the details from POS plus the Organisation Level 3 code from PDT for each position. And you can, of course, select as many fields as you like from PDT to include in your report.

File linking in the Chris21 report writer can be a difficult process to learn and become familiar with. I hope this article has helped to give you a better understanding of the hows and whys of file linking.

The post Chris21 Report Writer – How File Linking Works appeared first on System Logic.