Customizing Reports
Commerce Server 2002 provides a selection of predefined reports to analyze activity on your Web site. However, if required, you can create new custom reports or customize both dynamic and static reports to meet your business needs.
Customizing Static Reports
Customizing Dynamic Reports
Customizing Static Reports
To create a custom static report, you or your site developer use SQL scripts. Sample scripts to create custom static reports are included in the Commerce Server SDK. For more information about sample scripts and tools for static reports, see ''Business Analytics Samples'' in Commerce Server 2002 Help.
Customizing Dynamic Reports
You can modify a dynamic report definition and save it as a custom report definition, which is then added to the Reports module. You use custom dynamic report definitions to create new views of the data in dynamic reports. For example, you can run the Usage Trend report to view the total requests, users, and visits per year for your site.
If you want to see more details about usage trends, you can create a new dynamic report definition from the Usage Trend report to show usage trends by the type of user who visits your site, or to show usage trends over different time periods (per day, per month, or per quarter) instead of per year. When you save the Usage Trend report with your changes, the new report definition is added to the Reports module. Refresh the Reports list in the Reports module to show the new dynamic report definition. For more information about creating a new dynamic report definition, see Creating a New Dynamic Report Definition.
You create a custom dynamic report definition by changing the PivotTable of an existing report, and saving the result as a new report definition. You can change the PivotTable of an existing report by adding and removing filters, sorting the displayed data, adding measures, moving fields, changing the data that is detailed and summarized, and by pivoting (or manipulating) the columns and rows. For example, you can expand the year dimensions of the Usage Trends report and see usage trends by day. You can expand the year dimensions, remove the year, quarter, and day dimensions and see usage data by month only.
For more information about working with PivotTables, .gif "Help")
button in a PivotTable screen to view Microsoft PivotTable List Help.
Your system administrator can create custom static and dynamic report definitions and add them directly to the database used by reports.
For information for site developers creating custom reports, see ''Creating Custom Reports,'' and for information about planning for creating custom reports, see ''Planning for the Business Analytics System'' in Commerce Server 2002 Help.
See Also
Creating a New Dynamic Report Definition
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