Best practices for using Smart Reporting

We recommend that you review the best practices for using BMC Helix Business Workflows Smart Reporting effectively when performing the following tasks:

• Creating custom reports
• Designing dashboards
• Creating views (data models)
• Customizing views

Creating custom reports

The best practices for creating custom reports are as follows:

• Do not modify out-of-the-box reports that are provided with BMC Helix Business Workflows Smart Reporting. If you would like to make changes to a report, create a copy, save and make changes to the copy.
• For better performance, create multiple small reports with only a few columns per use case, rather than creating a large report with many columns to solve multiple use cases.
• While designing a report, use a filter with smaller time frames, for example, 1 day or 1 week.
• We recommend designing a report by using a database with less data in a test environment first, and then importing the report to the production environment.

Designing dashboards

The best practices for designing dashboards are as follows:

• Do not modify out-of-the-box dashboards that are provided with BMC Helix Business Workflows Smart Reporting. If you would like to make changes to a dashboard, create a copy, save and make changes to the copy.
• Add only those reports to the dashboard that are relevant to the use cases. The dashboard loads all reports every time you view it, which can impact performance.

Creating views (data models)

The best practices for creating views are as follows:

• Create multiple small views specific to use cases instead of one large view that covers all use cases.
• Plan for view objects like forms and fields that will be included in the new view.
• To make a view more useful, give business names to the view objects.

Customizing views

The best practices for customizing out-of-the-box views are as follows:

• We recommend that you do not delete the current objects, joins, forms, fields, or tables from the out-of-the-box views. BMC will continue to update out-of-the-box views with every release.
• If you choose to modify out-of-the-box views, create and save a copy of the out-of-the-box view, and then make changes to the copy.
  For example, create a copy of the Case – Cases View, call it Case – Cases View – CUSTOM, and make changes to the custom view. 
• Although you can create multiple custom views for each out-of-the-box view, we recommend that you combine your changes into as few customized views as possible.
• When you create new objects in a view, always use unique names; for example, Object_X or X_Object.

Implications of customized views on reports and dashboards

• Existing reports do not automatically update their view references to the custom views. You must update the references manually. See Modifying an out-of-the-box view .
• You can continue to use existing reports that refer to existing views. You can also create new reports that refer to custom views.
• If you choose to update out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, ensure that you create a copy, and make changes to the copy.

Implications of customized views on an upgrade

• BMC will continue to update out-of-the-box views with every release update. Existing out-of-the-box views will be overwritten.
• To update your customized views, you must manually reconcile updates from BMC to the customized views.
  For example, you have copied the out-of-the-box Case – Cases View to create a Case – Cases View – Custom view. You then customized the copied view. After the upgrade, BMC added a few new tables, and new fields from existing tables, to the out-of-the-box Case – Cases View. To update the Case – Cases View – Custom, you must reconcile it with the upgraded out-of-the-box Case – Cases View, and manually make changes to the ‘Case – Cases View – Custom view.