Collating Reports

If you are publishing the same report each day or week, you can collate those reports into one monthly or yearly report, avoiding the time and disk space associated with reporting on a month or year's worth of Storage data.

This option produces separate XML formatted reports with a specified 'tag'. You can then select this tag to collate all the data in all the XML reports together, and generate or publish a single report. See Collating Reports.

Note: This feature has been superceded by the Dynamic Reports tab in the Web Module that enables users to collate multiple reports of the same type into one report (7 daily reports into one weekly report for example).

You can view your collatable reports on the Reports tab, in the Report Manager section via the Collatable Reports tab. You will only be able to see reports that have been marked as available for collation.

Generating Collatable Reports

To collate reports, you first need to generate reports as normal, but mark them for collation. As an example, let's generate multiple reports tagged for collation. We'll use the 'Create separate report document for each' option to generate more than one report, but you can also do this when producing a single report on a daily schedule for example.

  1. On the Reports tab, select the Web Usage Overview report template, and click the Generate report link
  2. Select your Storage and click Next
  3. On the Formats page, select the Web Document (HTML, loose files) format and click Next
  4. On the Publish page, enter a name for the report and check the Make this report available for collation checkbox
  5. Enter Web Usage Overview as the tag for your report and click Next
  6. To generate more than one report, on the Documents page, ensure that the Create a separate report document for each: checkbox is marked.
  7. Select Date from the summary drop-down box and select.
  8. Proceed through the wizard and then click OK to generate your report.

After your reports have generated, click on the Collatable Reports tab in the Report Manager at the bottom of the screen to view your collatable reports.

The left hand panel contains a tree listing your tags with the reports templates used to generate collatable reports underneath. When you select a template, the collatable reports will be displayed in the right-hand panel. If you followed the steps above, you should see a report for each date.

Collating Reports:

Now that you have some collatable reports, you can combine them into one report.

  1. On the Reports tab, click Collate report
  2. Select your Web Usage Overview tag (created above) and click Next
  3. On the Date Range page, select Absolute and choose a date range that exists within your collatable reports.
  4. Select the Web Document (HTML, loose files) format and click Next
  5. On the Publish page, enter a document name, select any desired publishing options and click Next
  6. Enter your email options if you wish to email the report and click OK

You reports will now be collated into one. This process of 'reporting on reports' is much faster than reporting on the raw storage data over long periods. It is therefore more efficient to create daily or weekly collatable reports, then use these to produce your monthly or yearly reports.

Issues

There are a few issues to be aware of when collating reports.

Modifying Report Templates

If you generate a range of reports and tag them as collatable, then modify the report template, and generate another range of reports with the same tag, only the latest version of the template will be used in the final collation. If you have deleted a node from a report template, the information generated from that node will not be in the final report.

Count Distinct Aggregate

Report nodes that contain a column based on the Count Distinct aggregate (such as 'number of sites', 'number of users', etc) cannot be collated. For example, if one collatable report contains a list of users with a 'number of sites' column, such as

User Number of Sites
John 35
Stef 25
Chris 18

Then the next collatable report contains this information:

User Number of Sites
John 35
Stef 19
Chris 3

How many unique websites did John, Stef or Chris visit over the entire period?

Vantage cannot reliably calculate the number of unique sites that each user visited given this data alone, as the user probably visited some of the same sites in each report.

If your report template contains the Count Distinct aggregate, the values for that column in the final collated report will be 0. A warning is displayed when you tag a report for collation that contains a count distinct aggregate.

Average Aggregate

For columns based on the 'Average' aggregate, the values in the final collated report will be the average of these.

For example, take the following two reports:

User Average Size Average Browsing Time
John 15 MB 00:09:00
User Average Size Average Browsing Time
John 80 MB 00:06:00

When these two reports are collated, the values in the final report will be 47.5MB (average of 15 MB and 80 MB) and a browsing time of 00:07:30 (average of 9 minutes and 6 minutes).

These figures will be slightly different than the values in a report generated on the original data.