Searching and reporting for Freedom of Information Requests

RE: Searching and reporting for Freedom of Information Requests

Lee Jackson — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 10:48:36 GMT

Hi Allan,

The works extract via the Query Works form is a good idea and I will raise an enhancement request for you.

However in the meantime, I logged into your database via Discoverer Plus and found that someone has already created a works report for you. Please could you have a look at this and see if it fulfils your requirement?

The report was created in the 22nd February 2013 by the ATLAS user and is titled 'Works by date, street, tm and who'.

I also noticed that your end user layer in Discoverer has already been configured to use the Information Manager Foundation layer views. The IMF views pull together related data which is normally held in separate tables, while using more intuitive column descriptions that are reliably maintained between upgrades.

Please have a look at this and let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks,

RE: Searching and reporting for Freedom of Information Requests

Allan Pike — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 10:08:16 GMT

Thanks Lee,

From the sounds of it I have to create my own report then. I don't understand why I cannot just search for information within the EXOR application and export it there and then into a spread sheet, That is what other software systems would do. The proposed solution does not seem user friendly and you are reliant on having someone competent enough in your organisation to create these reports.

Discoverer is limited in what it can report as I am only able to select from one set of tables, so if not all of the information is held in one table, then I can't provide the full information. Because of this, and the level of uncertainty on what data is actually being reported, I would still have to go back and check it against the query I ran in EXOR, which brings me back to my original point, why not just allow a spread sheet (in .xls format or in a way that prevents carriage returns from being treated as commas) to be exported from the application?

RE: Searching and reporting for Freedom of Information Requests

Lee Jackson — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 09:50:23 GMT

Hi Allan,

You can use almost any form in the exor product to query records and use the query count button to give a count of the records that would be returned for your query.

If you need to produce an extract of data, then you could look at using an Information Manager 4 report, or create your own report using Oracle Discoverer.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks,