• State Verified Answer
  • Replies 3 replies
  • Answers 1 answer
  • Subscribers 10 subscribers
  • Views 1769 views
  • Users 0 members are here

Searching and reporting for Freedom of Information Requests

Allan Pike
Offline

Is there an easy way of searching and reporting for Freedom of Information requests?

I have been ask to supply a spread sheet of all works on a road between one date and another. I ran the report in Query Works, but of course you cant export from there. I have tried using TMA>Reports>Coordination Planning but this does not show everything. I have then tried Locator, but for some reason this is showing no results, and even if it did I would then have to drag and drop loads of fields because a carriage return is treated as a comma in .CSV format.

There must be an easy way to do this and get an accurate report. Can someone please point me in the right direction.

Thanks

  • 0 Offline in reply to Allan Pike
    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,

    Lee Jackson  | Product Manager

    Answer Verified By: Sarah Willis-Culpitt 

  • 0 Offline in reply to Lee Jackson
    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?
  • 0 Offline

    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,

    Lee Jackson  | Product Manager

Communities
Support and Services
Training and Learning
Social Media