It is important to be selective when choosing forms to use with Report Builder. Report Builder was designed around a simple concept; to consolidate data from multiple forms into a single report. This report can be run once, or you can schedule this report to run and be emailed to you or others on a repetitive basis.
Your form can have multiple tables but Report Builder was designed to use a single table from within your form. You currently cannot use a repeatable section. All data elements within your selected table will be available with the exception of elements that contain signatures or other non-data entries.
Report builder works by building a large table with many columns and rows. If you select a form with no table each form will represent one row in the table of all forms consolidated together. For example, if you pick a form that has many fields but you only select four of those fields as your report inputs, then each form would be one row in a four column table. i.e. : Employee Name, Start Date/Time, End Date/Time, Duration.
If you have ten employees submitting one form a day and you ask the report to run each Friday night, your table will be four columns by 50 rows. You will be able to run a report using Employee Name as your Group By so that you could see the weekly timesheet for each employee.
Let's change the form. Your form now has a field for Customer Name, Date and Supervisor Name. It also has a table for Product Sold, Price, Qty and Total.
If you pick the fields as inputs and the table, Report Builder will create multiple rows for each form. It will create a seven column table combining your inputs and your table elements. It will create a row for each row in your table. This means for each product sold, we will also know the Customers Name, the Date it was sold and the Supervisors Name. These rows will be combined with all the other rows from all the other forms to create a seven column table with multiple rows depending on how many total forms were submitted for the date range and how any products were sold in each form.
The Report Builder can now build a report by Product, by Supervisor, by Customer or even by date using the group by function or they select to run a report for a specific Customer and or Product and or Date and or Supervisor.
Each form must have at least one Date field. Reports cannot be run for more than 31 day periods. You can pick a single day, a custom date range or if you would like to create reports that are recurring you can use variable date ranges like Yesterday, Today, Last Week, This Week, Last Month and This Month. You can also ask for a report to run for a pre-defined number of days back using the Last N Days Back Date Range.
Examples
If you want a report every Monday for last week, you would pick last week as your Date Range. In the email schedule section, you would pick Weekly to define how often you want the report to run and Monday as the day your weekly report would get generated. This means each Monday the system will generate a report for you based on forms found where the Date is between Sunday and Saturday of the prior week.
Some reports do not fit nicely into a week or month. For these reports you can either use a custom Date Range and run the report once or you can use the Last N Days Back option. So if you want a report to run every week on Wednesday from last Wednesday through Tuesday, then set the Last N days to 7. In the Email schedule section, set the weekly option and Wednesday as your Report Date.