Best practices for using BMC Remedy Smart Reporting

This topic describes the best practices for using BMC Remedy Smart Reporting effectively when performing the following tasks:

Creating custom reports

The best practices for creating custom reports are as follows:

Do not modify out-of-the-box reports provided with BMC Remedy Smart Reporting. However, if you choose to modify a report, ensure that you first create and save a copy of it.
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, we recommend using 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.
We recommend not using Remedy Smart Reporting as an ETL tool which typically deals with high data volume.
For more information on best practices for using Remedy Smart Reporting, see the Yellowfin knowledgebase article at Report Builder.

The best practices for designing dashboards are as follows:

Do not modify out-of-the-box dashboards provided with BMC Remedy Smart Reporting. However, if you choose to modify a dashboard, ensure that you first create and save a copy of it.
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.

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.

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

BMC strongly recommends 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 Incident Management view, call it Incident Management - CUSTOM, and make changes to the custom view.
Although you can create multiple custom views for each out-of-the-box view, BMC recommends 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.

Existing reports do not automatically update their view references to the custom views. You must update the references manually. See Updating semantic view references in out-of-the-box reports to custom views.
You can continue to use existing reports that refer to existing views. You can 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.

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, say that you copied the out-of-the-box Incident Management view to create a new Incident Management - Custom view. You then customized the copied Incident Management - Custom view. After the upgrade, BMC added a few new tables, and new fields from existing tables, to the out-of-the-box Incident Management view. To update the Incident Management - Custom view, you must reconcile it with the upgraded out-of-the-box Incident Management view, and manually make changes to the Incident Management - Custom view.