8.1.4 Creating a Report with Prompts

This lesson will show you how to create a report with prompts that you can use to search for particular instances. Before doing this you should know how to create a basic report, which you can find here, and how to create a report with conditions which can be found here.

Create a case using the entity you wish to search as a condition

To create a case that allows users to search as specific condition, first of all create a case that uses the entity you wand to search as a condition.

In this example we are creating a report that allows a user to enter a username to see which cases that user has created.In order to to this we will set "Case created by Name" as the sorting condition.

Allow the user to enter their own prompt

By typing ("Enter Name") you will create a prompt in the report for the user to enter the name with which the records will be sorted. The text within the brackets and quotation marks can be anything you want as it only serves as a title to the search page. After this is done, save the report as normal.

Enter your search criteria

when you run the report, you will now be met with your prompt and the opportunity to enter text. In this case the prompt we created was "Enter Name" so when the name "John Smith" is entered the report will search the system for all of the cases created by John Smith.

Once you have entered the name you wish to search, click "OK" to proceed and generate the report.

Results

The report will now generate and list all of the cases created by John Smith.

You can search by any criteria on the system, making this kind of report very useful for picking out specific pieces of data. As this example shows, instead of having to create a new report to see which cases each user has opened, instead you can create a single report that allows the use to enter their own search term.

Date format prompts

If you want to give users a prompt to enter a date, it is possible to format the prompt as a calendar so that users can select a date instead of having to enter it manually.

To do this, add a comma then "Date" after the closing quotation mark of the prompt but before the closing bracket. As you can see in the image, the prompt ("Enter Date") becomes ("Enter Date",Date) when this formatting option is inserted.

When the date formatting option has been entered correctly, The user will be presented with a calendar to select a date from when they run the report.