General Feedback

Hallie Guiseppe 1

Good morning @Christopher Anderson and team,

Today I was using web view to pull a gift detail & summary report for a team member and encountered a situation that I thought is worth noting. The report I ran didn't have any results and the report ran as though it did. In database view if a report returns no info you get a notification. See images below:

Web view report with no records

Database view with notification.

I prefer the notification so I can manage the report criteria without having to wait for the report to generate, then download and find no results.

Austen Brown

I second @Hallie Guiseppe! I'd much rather have a pop-up that notifies me immediately then finding out later.

Christopher Anderson 3

@Hallie Guiseppe @Austen Brown

Thanks for the feedback.

This is one area where we have some technical limitations in replicating the database view experience, allow me to explain a bit further and propose something that might be at least a step in the requested direction…

This ultimately comes down to a difference as to how things are implemented in a web view experience vs a local RE7 instance. As such, we are not able to calculate results without going through the process of generating a report. This has pros/cons…

Pros: For example, in Web View, we are able to run multiple reports at the same time, to run a report asynchronously (ie go about other work while it processes), clean up the report output, provide sharing and scheduling native to reports.

Cons: However, as is the case here, since we aren’t running the underlying SQL in a local RE7 instance, it takes longer to calculate if “No records are found”.

That said…

If you all thought it was preferable, we could possibly trigger a notification instead of generating the report, this would be a bit faster than generating the entire report, opening the PDF/CSV and seeing the “No results" message. In this case, we could simply say the report job “completed” but post a message on the Recently Run tab that “No results were found” and you wouldn't get a PDF or CSV. This would be a bit faster than waiting for the entire report to generate. Would you all consider that helpful or would you rather leave it as is?

Katrina Noplos

@Christopher Anderson I like the workaround solution, as it sounds like it saves precious seconds (saying that entirely in a non-facetious way, promise!) and bridges the gap a bit more to get closer to that instant pop up!

Irene Hui

@Christopher Anderson Hello! I also think that workaround would be helpful. Thanks!

Austen Brown

@Christopher Anderson - Alongside the proposed workaround, could the "no results found" message also appear within the completion pop-up notification? Additionally, would it be possible to add an alert icon at the top of the window, near the tabs? (see below for what we're thinking).

These enhancements would allow users to see if an issue occurred from where they are, without navigating to the “Recently Run” tab. This would be particularly helpful when running multiple reports simultaneously, as it would promptly inform users if a specific report failed to retrieve the expected results.

Hallie Guiseppe 1

@Christopher Anderson
I like your suggestions for having the notification an no pdf/csv created. I also like @Austen Brown's suggestions for alerts. We often run (hope someday to schedule) multiple reports during specific times of the month/year and an alert that something went wrong with a report would be very helpful. I think it is key to not offer the download b/c having the option to download a report with no content seems like a mixed signal.