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Here’s the story. You go to Search Reports for Keyword and enter a term. It shows you some default reports, then more additional reports, and you’ve got to run them to figure out which report you were actually looking for. Oh, and if you didn’t write down those reports or maybe made a mistake when writing one down, then you’ve got to search again. And if there are 50 reports, you’re going to spend hours searching.
"Surely, there is a better way..." which has been asked several times over the years, but nothing came to me on how to improve searching. Then I was recently asked again. My knee jerk reaction was to say, “no” or, “how would that work?” But then I was like, “now wait a minute!” You see, years ago I built the Favorite Reports feature, and it was a nightmare with all the pieces that went into running a report, so I was hesitant to get into something like it again.
With Favorite Reports, you determine the area, query, and report. When searching for a report, you get everything except the query. So couldn’t I prompt the user for that query when they're searching? And then...Bam! Things clicked in my mind: All I’m really doing is just setting up a favorite report minus the query.
Now don’t get me wrong--this is easier said than done. But I was onto something and after playing with the code a bit, I got something working. In 8.0.123, due out June 5th, you’ll be able to use the Sarch Reports for Keyword feature and click on the report to run it. You’ll have to figure out what query to run, but hopefully you can come up with that.
The best part about this is that if you are wrong, you can click another report in the list and try it. No more long, drawn out hunts. Fifty reports, if that is what it takes, will take minutes instead of hours to go through.
Keep asking those questions--you never know when I’ll see the way through to getting it to a “yes!”
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