Creating reports and report templates
A BMC Helix Capacity Optimization Report is a document that contains one or more charts, tables of metrics and descriptions for multiple entities for a selected time period.
Charts are produced as a result of analyses, models or of the execution of a scenario or a model in BMC Helix Capacity Optimization. If you use or include certain analyses or models frequently in your reports, you can also save this information for future use as a Report Template. Creating reports from report templates saves time, and requires fewer steps to accomplish the task.
For information about how to create and work with reports and report templates, see the following topics:
Report types
To create reports, navigate to the Works folder under Workspace > All Domains > Domain. You can create the following types of reports:
- Basic Report: A Basic Report can be created directly from the console. You can create a basic report either by including existing analyses or models, or create new analyses or models in the system from scratch and create a basic report that uses them. You can also create a basic report using a basic report template. In short, you require analyses or models to create a basic report, and you cannot create one without them.
- Composite Basic Report: A Composite Basic Report can be created by using existing basic reports. You can use the basic reports from same or different domains.
- Advanced Report: An Advanced Report can be created by using an advanced report template. You can create an advanced report template by using an external tool and cannot be created from the console. Advanced reports are similar to basic reports as they can also be created by using existing or new analyses. You can also customize the content and format of advanced reports, and use existing advanced report templates created using an external tool.
Report Template types
A report template defines the structure of a report, and describes its content in terms of the data to extract, and includes charts, tables, time period information and descriptions. After you create a report template, you can reuse it across different domains and time periods, to create or generate basic reports based on analyses and models that it contains.
The following report template types are available:
- Basic Report Template: It is a template that is based on the structure of a basic report. The basic concept behind it is to save a basic report as a template for future reuse, one that contains analyses and models that you frequently use or require. Doing this saves you time and quickens the process of creating a basic report based on frequently used analyses and time period information. Some important properties of a basic report template (BRT) are:
- If you modify or overwrite a BRT, all Basic Report instances associated with it will be impacted, and the configuration of the Basic Report will change.
- If you add a new Analysis or Model to the BRT, the first run of the Basic Report instance will include them.
- If you remove Analyses or Models from the BRT, those will be unlinked from the Basic Report (but not deleted).
- If you modify an Analysis or a Model contained in the BRT, the Analyses and the Models already instantiated will not be modified. This is critical because, if something does not go right with a particular Analysis or a Model contained in a BRT, you will not be able to modify the Analysis or the Models that have already been instantiated. A simple solution at this point would be recreate the Analysis or the Model.
- Advanced Report Template: It is a template that is based on the structure of an advanced report. The basic concept behind it is to save an advanced report as a template for future reuse, one that contains analyses, models and other customizations that you frequently use or make to an advanced report. Doing this saves you time and quickens the process of creating an advanced report, which otherwise would require you to customize and format your advanced report in an external tool. You can add the following types of advanced report templates:
- Advanced Report Template – SQL-based data mart: Create a SQL-based data mart for an advanced report template. For more details, see Creating-a-SQL-based-data-mart-for-an-advanced-report-template.
- Advanced Report Template – BIRT: Upload the BIRT template file. For more details, see Adding-an-advanced-report-template.
- Advanced Report Template – Tabular: Add an advanced report template by uploading an XML source file to BMC Helix Capacity Optimization. The XML source file is based on tabular data.
Where to go from here
For information on creating reports and report templates in BMC Helix Capacity Optimization, see Creating-reports.
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